karpierz

> All existentialists need to give ol' Darwin a read. The only truth is survival.

You're saying that all existentialists should just be nihilists.

All nihilists need to give the ol' The Myth of Sisyphus a read. Actually read it, not some excerpt summarizing the arguments on Wikipedia.

I think parent poster's point is that security is a continuous, not binary, value. Things aren't secure/not secure. They simply have a cost for breaking them. The goal of effective security is to make that cost larger than the reward for breaking it.

For example, you might say my public-private key is secure. I take great care with my private key, etc. But I guarantee that for a few million dollars you could get it, simply by hiring some nefarious people to get it out of me and/or steal my computer. The thing that makes my private key secure is only the system, it's also other peoples' motivations for breaking it (or lack thereof).

How did Slashdot's voting system work?

> In your hypothetical, institutions would quickly realize that a bunch of non-college graduates were just as smart as college graduates.

Which would cause those institutions to move away from income as a means of deciding who gets in; much like in institutions now are moving away from standardized testing as a means of deciding who gets in.

> At least, these profit-seeking institutions don’t seem to think it would be better for them to shift their hiring from Stanford to kids with 4.1s and lower SATs who went to UCSB instead.

There's two assumptions here that you may want to reexamine:

1. Profit selling institutions are purely rational at hiring, and only hire based on merit. As in, if you're hired to work at a Wall Street firm, it's not because you went to Harvard; it's because you're smart. Which is very optimistic, to say the least.

2. That people are intrinsically smart or not, and the institution you go to doesn't change that. If test scores didn't correlate at all with merit, you'd still want to hire from Stanford over UCSB; not because the SAT scores are higher at Stanford but because Stanford is a better institution for educating people. So even if the people who go in are the same caliber, the people who come out are different.

To be clear, I'm not disagreeing that test scores can measure aptitude. I'm disagreeing with the line of reasoning where we have the following premises:

1. We live in a society where resources are allocated by performance in standardized testing.

2. Having more resources increases the likelihood you're successful.

3. People who are successful have high standardized test scores.

And conclude that standardized test scores are an accurate predictor of future success.

Let's steelman that a bit.

If you structured society such that only the top 0.5% of households by income could send their kids to college, you'd find that a lot of your successful entrepreneurs, judges, scientists, etc. went to college and had a high income growing up.

But I don't know that proposing something else, like standardized testing, as an alternative to this would be quite a remarkable claim. You're just saying that the scoring function produces a lot of false negatives.

I think this is conflating two phenomenon. The parent poster was asking:

Do companies push for the creation regulatory bodies to stifle competition?

Whereas regulatory capture is the process by which companies shape existing regulatory bodies to serve their interests. But it presumes the existence of a body to regulate them; regulatory capture can't occur if there isn't regulation to start with.

This scene really highlights the difference between the Clueless (Joffrey) and the Sociopath (Tywin): https://youtu.be/BM6kMHH-G64

You don't need to be afraid of Sociopaths as written. Especially not if you're just starting out.

Rather, think of them as massive waves on the ocean. They don't care whether you ride them to shore or are shattered beneath them. Focus more on figuring out which way the waves are going rather than how to stop them.

He brings up lichess briefly:

> 69. Upon announcing the Merger, it was reported that “With this, there is no other realistic chess competitor in sight (apart from the open-source and free Lichess platform), raising questions about monopolistic issues in the space and the reasons behind Chess.com’s recent price hike.”

> 70. Once completed, the Merger will further solidify Chess.com’s monopoly over the chess industry by, among other things, providing it total control over Chess24, one of the last few alternatives to Chess.com for online chess, and purchasing the Play Magnus brand, which has become virtually synonymous with chess.

Seems like a "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" kind of argument.

He insinuates that by merging Chess.com and PlayMagnus, Chess is basically all owned by the same entity.

Your comment was flagged because you're arguing against a strawman of liberal ideology.

If someone holds your views, then you don't need to convince them.

If someone doesn't hold your views, then you haven't given them any more information.

In either case, it doesn't move the conversation forward. All it can do is provoke a pointless argument. Hence, flagged.

It does suck. It's also the nature of business, speculative investment. Sometimes you invest capital in something and don't see returns.

If you want the employee to own the capital costs, then they better see capital returns as well.

> I think it is feasible for a dating site to figure that out, given enough data.

I've worked on the developer-side of this; I assure you, it's not. It's hard enough to predict if people will exchange messages with any reasonable precision + recall.

> It's a pretty damn strong signal when a user matches with someone, exchanges phone numbers, then deactivates their account. The ML algorithms will be trained to do everything possible to avoid that outcome.

Yeah, any dating site that does this is doomed to irrelevance.

If it were as easy to make a successful dating site by just optimizing for that signal, you should really do it. Match will acquire you for millions - billions, and the core code is relatively simple. You could get it running in under a week. Get some VC funding, do a gradual roll out onto a few colleges, you'll be a multi-millionaire by Spring.

This model ignores a key incentive: dating apps that don't successfully match won't be used.

So at best, the developer is incentivized to have the user find someone to date in the short term and have the relationship fail in a manner that doesn't reflect poorly on the dating site. And it's not really feasible for the dating site distinguish between "will successfully date for a few months" and "will successfully date for a lifetime".

You could apply the same logic to any long term purchase. Dealerships only sell lemons because they want you to come back and buy more cars. Recruiters only match you with companies that you'll definitely want to leave because they want to match you again. Realtors only show you houses you'll hate because then you'll want to move again.

Largely agree on your post, but one nit:

> If the US couldn't find buyers to finance its spending, it would default on its debt.

Why would the US have to default on its debt, when the debt is denominated in a currency that the US can freely print?

Poker would also break if you could just use algorithms to tell you how much to bet and when to fold.

I suppose any strategic, turn-based game breaks down as soon as you have a world class engine for it.

> Using a computer engine is part of learning and preparing in chess (AFAICT). What other sport has a similar issue where an extremely useful and essential and highly available tool in the sport is considered cheating based entirely on using it within the narrow window of a game? Of course it was going to leak into play in online games where you only have the data feed of moves and nothing else connecting the players.

Pretty much every e-sport with hidden information has this issue. CS:GO, DotA2, SC2. They all have replay analyzers to reveal the map and let you look back to figure out how to play better. But if there was a way to use them in game (map hacks), it'd invalidate the game.

> it is estimated that 90% of new world natives died of smallpox and viral herpes immediately following contact with europeans

Can you give an academic citation for this?

I can't find anything that would support these numbers, they're high even for older work that's since been debunked (and especially not "immediately"). I suspect that there's a methodological error, but I can't say for certain until I actually see how you've come to these numbers.

> Small pox wiped out double digit percentages of the indigenous population and devastated their society.

This is the kind of cherry picking I was talking about. It'd be like saying "disease killed a large portion of Jews during WWII". Technically, it's true. A lot of Jews died from disease (in concentration camps). But it avoids asking the question of "were there any aggravating factors (like sudden displacement from homes, famine, violence, etc.) that caused them to become more susceptible"?

The only book I've read on this list, Guns, Germs, and Steel, is heavily discredited amongst historians because it bases its conclusions on cherrypicked, exaggerated, or outright wrong facts, and also relies on some specious reasoning throughout the book.

Are the other books listed significantly better in terms of veracity?

The cream generally rises, sure.

But at what rate? And how long will they stay in the game without recognition before giving up? And do those numbers differ based on your color or where you're from?

Here's the issue: you've come to a conclusion, and then you're using that conclusion as an assumption to dismiss evidence against it.

For example: you say that it seems unlikely that Franklin considered Irish people inferior, because in 1755, Americans didn't have anti-Irish sentiment.

But the fact we're trying to determine is "was there anti-Irish sentiment in colonial era America", using Franklin's words as evidence. If you simply assume your conclusion and use it to invalidate evidence, then there isn't really a point to me providing evidence.

Something else worth noting is that Ben excludes Swedes from whiteness, despite their Protestantism.

Anyways, this isn't really a hill I care to die on, so I'll be bowing out of this discussion.

Benjamin Franklin[0]:

> Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.

tl;dr: Saxons and the English are White People. Other Europeans are "swarthy".

[0]: https://archive.org/details/increasemankind00franrich/page/1...

> Imagine being able to blacklist domains from your results. That would basically solve the problem, because the first time you encounter spammy garbage you'd simply nuke it forever.

Can this extension solve your problem?

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...

Isn't that what a class-action lawsuit is for?

Where did you get that from the article?

It's not saying "women are different than men", it's saying "journalists treat female managers less professionally than male ones".

> At some point we should outsource our armies and perhaps even governments.

Funnily enough, this was how war functioned in Europe between 1500-1750s. Armies were too expensive to maintain, so states hired mercenaries. The problem was that mercenaries wouldn't have any incentive to risk themselves to end things quickly. And when you inevitably run out of money to pay them, in the best case they'd just pack up and leave. In the worst case, they'd loot your city on the way out.

Source: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691027647/ma...

Fun fact: due to the small labor market for terrorists and education spurring political interests, terrorists are disproportionally well-educated men from upper class families. Essentially, they're very intense lobbyists.

Citation: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177823/wh...

> If I want to intentionally participate in the economy by dragging a carriage with people in it around in exchange for money, no one is going to employ me because my services are obviously inferior to those that a car can provide.

So here's the misunderstanding. The job of an artist is not to paint, or take photos, that's just the medium. Just like a software engineers job isn't to write code.

The artist's job is to elicit emotion. The means by which they do that, whether it's painting, photoshop, or running 10,000 prompts through DALLE till they find the thing they're looking for is irrelevant.

> DALLE allows any schmuck with zero artistic talent to generate their own art. It obviates the need for artists.

The same way Wordpress obviates the need for web devs.

> DALLE is to artists what self-driving cars are to truckers.

Always 10 years away from replacing them?