kldaace

>Assuming the Japanese don't have debates on bioethics.

Nice.

Boy was I disappointed when this was not about Frantz Fanon.

Two big problems with just moving people into shelters:

1. Homeless shelters are horribly funded and have long waiting lists for beds. This proposal provides no additional funding. My guess is most people will be forced to take the bus ticket option.

2. Shelter beds themselves are poorly maintained, unsanitary, and often have bed bugs. It sounds counter-intuitive but a lot of homeless people are _choosing_ the streets over homeless shelters.

To be honest, I think the people bankrolling this bid know that moving people into shelters is unfeasible, and they're cynically hoping to just bus the homeless out of San Francisco.

Worth reading about the Invisible Institute (http://invisible.institute/) which is the journalistic company Jamie Kalven, the author of this article, started. They've been the driving force behind most of the public oversight of the Chicago Police Department in recent years. In addition to calling for the release of the Laquan McDonald shooting video, they've published a database of over 56,000 misconduct complaint records against Chicago police officers.

I feel bad for those 340 employees. I can't imagine what it would feel like to have years of your work be exposed as (basically) a farce. I can barely stand working a week without getting results much less x years of my professional life.

I doubt she actually wrote this but to be fair all of their posts are written by "Staff Writer" except an op-ed linked by "Theranos Staff."

It's great that they're making these available, but I hope people don't use this as a substitute for actually going to the museum. Art is something best experienced in person. While a Jackson Pollock seems ridiculous on a computer screen, its scale and grandeur are something else in person.

I'm not ignoring new information, I'm just saying my priors are strong enough and the evidence is weak enough that this won't make me change my beliefs "too much."

I'm going to wait for more replication before I adjust my priors too much on this. It seems plausible prima facie, but I'm suspicious of their methodology. From the article (I don't have access to the working paper), it sounds like they might have been trying to test the significance of a lot of different variables, and this might just be the one that popped up.

"Yet Mr. Fraser-Jenkins has a point. Index funds don’t set prices; they only accept the prices that active investors have already set. If everyone owned index funds, he says, “no one would be doing” the job of figuring out what securities are worth."

The situation described is clearly not a Nash equilibrium. If you have special, accurate information on the price of a security, then you're going to act on it. Why would no one be doing the work of pricing something if it's profitable? Sounds like actively managed mutual funds are getting antsy because people are starting to realize that they're getting screwed not going with index funds.

It actually may, and this is something being debated in the courts.

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2016/07/28/judge-first-amendment-pr...

Ah thanks, I actually hadn't seen that. Maybe in the future these predictions can be handled by some sort of betting market.

Every time I see an article like this, I wonder whether these experts have put their money where their mouths are. I'm sure there are plenty of Uber investors willing to take the other side of this bet, especially if you think the company is worth less than half of its valuation. Otherwise, it makes it hard for me to believe their opinion.

;)

I don't know whether this has been or can be studied formally, but anecdotally I think modern writing often suffers from excess verbiage. Essays sometimes go on for a long time without saying much, and this can cause a lot of frustration for readers. I'm sure many of you have felt this frustration when reading political opinion pieces.

A fun exercise that illustrates Orwell's point, when reading a sentence, see how much you can reduce it without losing its original meaning. For instance, I frame your question as follows:

"Do we know if this has been studied? It's not obvious that succinctness is better for readability and comprehension. It might be worse."

You can think of this as the writer's version of code golf.