mtgp1000

I think what you're saying about reduced barriers to entry has lowered the standard of all popular media.

It used to be expensive to publish anything - especially the further back in time you go. So classics for example typically represent particularly bright writers, as having something published before the printing press, and widely disseminated, was simply unlikely to happen.

But today anyone can create an account on YouTube or stream on twitch and it doesn't matter if the content is of any particular quality or veracity, so long as the common man sees what he wants to see.

I think there's a major secondary effect, in that now that we are surrounded by low quality media, the average person's ability to recognize merit in general is lessened.

If you mean tabula rasa then yes, that's obviously nonsense.

Anger is not proof of anything, and that's something this entire movement does not understand. There is fundamentally no evidence to support the notion that equality of opportunity leads to equality of outcome. That goes for the justice system.

That's a little racist, don't you think?

>What do they want Google to do?

I don't know about "them" but I want Google to stop tracking me and building a secret profile of intimate and politically sensitive information on my person. Full God damn stop. I take as many steps as I can but even not using Google's services is no guarantee of protection and leaving the internet behind completely is not practical if you wish to succeed in modern society.

Adtech is the cancer that is forming the foundation for unprecedented human rights abuses. Look at the state of the country, imagine what either political extreme would do with access to even a fraction of the data that platforms like Google and Facebook collect. A wet dream shared by every dictator in history, from Stalin to Hitler to Mao.

I did not consent.

>I'd rather have imperfect progress than no progress

Progress for the sake of progress is not progress. The fact that there is a problem doesn't mean that someone has to do something when there's nothing productive to be done.

People are apparently unaware that we are living in an unprecedented globalist diversity experiment, and there's no reason to believe that forcing disparate cultures to live in such close proximity to each other will end positively. In fact history has repeatedly shown the opposite.

>When we are aware that behaviors and symbols are hurtful to other humans, and we genuinely believe that other people should be able to live without fear, then we should change both.

Some of us believe that the answer to a world which is chock full of scary things beyond our control is to learn to live internally without fear, not to impose our personal delicate sensibilities on upon others. This isn't cowardice and this kind of shaming only turns moderates away from your cause. Furthermore nonsense like microaggressions are effectively a form of thought control and when whiteness is treated as some original sin together with a completely subjective system of rules you have a social structure which is effectively designed to be abused for the transfer of power, while ostensibly claiming to be a champion of equality.

Are you really surprised that people turn away from an ideology which treats them as though they owe the world something, or need to change their behavior, for the color of their skin? We used to call that racism. Now it's increasingly normalized and shoved in our faces if we want corporate work. Frankly, people are tired of the bullshit and I'm worried about how far the pendulum is going to swing back.

The fact that there is propaganda on ZH doesn't mean there isn't also factual information on there. That's the scrutiny I'm talking about. You and Google both are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

At this point I'd rather read ZH with scrutiny than watch anything on cable news, or anything "reputable" online.

At least ZH doesn't lie to you. The facts are presented, the narrative is painted, but in a manner that is open to questioning. It's pure speculation, and that's ok, because that's how and where investigations start. By the time reputable spots pick it up it's usually months old.

I don't see how the Dutch story is relevant, if it's the one I looked up, and it sounds therefore like there is at best circumstantial evidence. Even motive isn't very reliable because all kinds of people are out to do things like influence the elections.

I saw a screenshot of a CNN article which said that that the CIA frequently used tactics to make hacks appear as though they were from Russia. Which is something I always suspected was relatively easy to do...change some logs, some timestamps, use some existing code...I'm not a hacker per se, but most of us write code here and deal with these kinds of things...

So does anything in this vault possibly call certain recent allegations of Russian interference into question?

The article is about merit aid. It's the usual privilege stuff. If we stop rewarding exceptional students who "don't need aid" we're going to see fewer exceptional students, and that's bad for society.

Gifted kids disproportionately benefit society per dollar as compared to the rest. If you assume that competence has a normal or pareto-like distribution then it makes sense to allocate a lot of your money for merit based awards. We all benefit.

> don't think it's blowing it out of proportion to have a zero-tolerance policy toward police murdering the people they're arresting

Who is arguing this? Anywhere? Why are people being treated as though they're trying to excuse murder? That's dehumanizing.

>One of these days the cops could sit on your neck or your child's neck until you pass out and die

This may seem like a trivial dismissal, but one of us has a different approach to parenting, and I suspect it is shared by approximately 50% of the voting population. I would teach my children to cooperate with police under the circumstances in the Floyd video. I would also teach them not to do drugs in public.

No, this is not victim blaming, and I do believe that the force in this case was excessive and unnecessary. But I also advocate for teaching people to function in a society where their actions affect others and can create dangerous situations unnecessarily.

This. I watch in disbelief as people totally disregard statistics in leu of mass hysteria. There are some 370MM interactions with police every year in the US and the overwhelming majority of them happen without incident. Moreover something like 8 "unarmed" black men died in 2019 vs 50 "unarmed" white men.

Those who disagree, tell me: the ratio of incarcerated males to females is something like 9:1. Similarly a far greater number of men die at the hands of police than women. Is the justice system biased against men?

And if we extend this myopic logic, is there a huge problem of racism in the black community? Because black on white crime (including violent crime) is something like 10x the rate of white on black crime. Is there a systemic problem with racism in the black community?

The entire country has gone insane.

Edit: if there's something wrong with my reasoning, please feel free to point it out. Silent downvotes only reinforce the stigma, yes, stigma that is now associated with the same rational inquiry that I'm paid to perform each day as a research scientist.

Edit 2: I can't find a source for the 370MM number and I suspect it was generous with the definition of interaction...here's another source that gives just shy of 70MM - still high enough that what's going on is blowing things way out of proportion. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/pbtss11.pdf

>The Regents argued that the tests discriminated w/o evidence

That's the entire diversity/inclusion in a nutshell. None of this has been scientifically verified and the basic premise is in contradiction with what we know about humans. But bringing this up anywhere where your name is visible is liable to get you cancelled.

>This is a serious matter, and that fact that you can't bring yourself to empathize with people being brutalized reflects very poorly on your ethical code

1/3 of my people were subject to genocide infamously by oven, more recently than slavery, but I'm not expecting people to remove any reference to fire or pizza from my life, that would be absurd. So is this. None of the people coding were slaves, I guarantee it, and they can move past it just like all other populations move past various atrocities that they experience. This focus on blacks is a fad, you can arbitrarily define a near infinite number of "marginalized" groups if you carve up 360MM people.

But what does make it difficult is being told all your life that you are a victim, held back by something about yourself that you cannot change; that's how you breed weakness and teach learned helplessness.

The only value colleges can hold comes from the rigor that ensures scarcity of degrees. Lowering the bar in a naive attempt to bring college to everyone only devalued the degree, and now we are seeing the slow decay of even our most prestigious universities.

No good will come from ignoring the natural distribution of intelligence.

>This makes sense: Harvard has a huge issue with discrimination against Asian Americans, who are not represented according to their ACT/SAT score distribution. If Harvard could waive away these scores, they can continue their admissions policy that favor students from wealthy families who pay full price, and are likely to be institutional givers after graduation by focusing on admission factors that are much less accountable, like "personality".

Please. This is about affirmative action for people who aren't Asian or White. Not wealthy donors. The argument is that lack of privilege causes poor SAT scores which is preventing certain minorities from realizing their potential, and that this justifies selectively lowering the bar and allocating additional resources.

But this is all based on a conflation between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity.

You're right, and it goes much deeper. These corporations effectively own enough of our data to trivially deanonymize and target people. An organization of people who believe they are morally justified in they cause are liable to abuse such information, regardless of which side they belong to.

That's the most terrifying part to me as a dev. We don't even need neural networks to search petabytes of social media content for keywords. If we allow corporations to become politicized then we open ourselves up to unprecedented abuses.

You're right - they affect the livelihoods of far more people.

Are you thinking about the consequences of your breathing? Because every breath grants you the oxygen that your body needs to metabolize the food you eat into useful energy for you to fight the power. So even breathing is political!

Again, it's a meaningless statement. We deliberately draw the line somewhere, partly to avoid incessant infighting over pedantic "political" but not actually political things.

Do you want to know how to turn an entire generation of people against your cause? Impose your politics onto them at work and facilitate a culture of suppression and targeting for anyone critical. This is happening all across society right now and the pendndulum is already starting to swing back and when ivory tower CEOs impose their views onto people who just want to do their jobs, the swing only builds momentum

>All corporations are political

This is a meaningless statement that people use to justify railroading their personal politics into everything.

By making my services available to everyone equally I am emphatically not making a political statement.

This same sentiment is effectively turning an increasing proportion of consumers away from entertainment media.

Mathematical modeling that is 3-6 orders of magnitude faster, we are already talking deployment.

Same for ML powered solutions to data management - I don't want to say enough to identify anything.

My team has been working on a rudimentary humanlike reasoning engine based loosely on what AlphaGo proved: that machines can learn heuristics identical, equal to, or better than those of humans.

And for perspective, AlphaGo was what...4 years ago? Just look at the growth of compute available cheaply in the cloud since then! These next few decades are going going to see a phenomenal acceleration that's already starting...assuming we don't hit some unforseen limit or block. But even with what we've discovered now, we have more than enough in the way of new tools to refine across industry and society for decades.

I'm not sure how anyone who's watched the exponential growth of a brand new domain can pick a point today to and say that things aren't as good as we expected. What may have happened was that some eager CEOs have overpromised on timelines and resources. But the revolution is coming, ML is already starting to change society.

We're building the tech. Right now. The author does not even realise the immeasurable potential that general purpose function approximators are having right now across all domains. The applications are not only limitless but they're being realized right now and it's insulting to have my work dismissed so shallowly by someone who speaks with such authority.

There's far more to do with ML and AI than self driving cars and shitty ad recommendations. It's just that the people who live at the intersection of mathematics, programming, and third domains are rare; give us some time. Even $16T in value by 2030 is 2-4 US GDPs from something which basically did not exist 5 years ago.

I disagree, hiking rough terrain is an excellent time for me to think, personally. I find the stimulation is additive.

Sort of like bouncing a leg or twirling a pen.

> saying she was too busy with courtly life to follow his instructions

That's because his instructions were totally extreme even by today's standards. This says nothing about averages and ultimately as a noble she simply did not want to.

>And exercise, the other thing that's nicer for thinking behind doing nothing besides warm water, was also not really a thing for women then

Are you implying that women just sat around not thinking all the time? Because I am too, but for different reasons, and not just men.

The vast majority of people are not interested in thinking beyond the bare minimum. Otherwise we'd have more than a tiny fraction of the population purposefully self learning.

People back then had miles to walk and no phones to stare at or tvs to watch. There was plenty of time to think.

It's easy to think of ideas that others have had (interpolate). Much harder to synthesize new ideas (extrapolate), or at least those of significance. Probably related to P NP problem.

Edit: yes, verifying would be P and synthesizing would be NP. And with this new intuition I suppose encryption will probably be safe!