mycologos

No, please, I come to Hacker News to get away from platitudinous, short, vague LinkedIn advice.

Could you? Some elections only feature old candidates. This limit is a way of making sure there is at least one non-old choice.

The thing that's missing is living under a functional government.

Unlike the United States government, the Mexican government has been fighting, and maybe losing, a civil war against cartels for a long time. This episode is, if anything, a positive step in that civil war, in the enemy-of-my-enemy sense, so it seems reasonable that a central government would at least deprioritize addressing it.

As far as I know the example you mention was the work of Andrea James, and not Conway, but Conway's continued collaboration with someone that cruel and unhinged is, I think, an aspect of her life that shouldn't be ignored.

(Does it cancel out her many unambiguously positive and praiseworthy achievements? No. People are complicated.)

"Most" is pretty hard, so I'll just pick one I think is good. I'm paraphrasing here, so errors are mine.

Sea otters, which feed themselves through long dives to and from the ocean floor, with a blind and hurried pawing for urchins in the middle, have hands that are about as sensitive as human hands, but significantly faster. Tasked with distinguishing boards with slightly different small ridges, humans compare and re-compare before deciding; if an otter touches the correct board first, it doesn’t touch the second one at all. This is true even though a human fingertip, if inflated to the size of the earth, is sensitive enough to distinguish between cars and houses. A manatee’s face is about as good.

I mean, he certainly would have known exactly what he was doing at some point in his life, but skills and judgement do degrade with age.

If you're a layperson interested in these sensory questions, I highly recommend the book An Immense World by Ed Yong. It's a 400-something page tour through the many senses animals have and we (mostly) don't. It might have the highest density of truly cool animal facts per page of anything I've ever read, despite being written for adults who maybe haven't considered themselves the audience for fun animal facts in decades.

The Dunning-Kruger effect, and its many misspellings, might be the most overused term on this website.

A modern example is Dana Gioia, who switched from poetry grad school to business school, did that for ~15 years, and eventually went back to full-time writing, chaired the NEA, and is I think the current poet laureate ot California. Here's a bit from an interview, about his time working at Jell-O, that weaves this together [1]:

> Every day for a year a group of us would meet after lunch and try every recipe ever devised for Jell-O. They were all elaborate and time-consuming. Finally we happened upon a recipe for small slices of concentrated Jell-O that you could pick up with your fingers. I had all the men on the team make them with me. We figured if we could make them, anyone could. We added the idea of shapes and negotiated with Bill Cosby to advertise them. Every box in the U.S. sold off the shelves. My job at the National Endowment for the Arts is oddly similar: to understand how to take all the agency’s resources and, in addition to everything else we’re doing, come up with a few ideas that are transformative.

And more relevant to this thread:

> I would tell young poets worried about struggling to make a living at their craft to consider alternatives in business before launching an academic career. A poet always struggles. If you work in business, you have the freedom to choose the ring you struggle in. There are many jobs in which a creative person who can write excels. An N.E.A. grant can be a watershed in a writer’s career. It’s the first time some people can write full time. The grant is financial, but also validating. Honor can be even more valuable than money to artists. It gives them the right to take their artistic vocation more seriously.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/jobs/28boss.html

Doesn't this kind of make sense? Stuff with high personal resonance, by virtue of being personal, has a specific audience. That sounds trite, but I at least tend to underrate how much the stuff I really like is just a weirdly shaped key fitting into a weirdly shaped lock somewhere in my brain.

My theory for Tokyo is that its relatively low housing costs come from lax enforcement of zoning and building regulations, and lax enforcement comes from a culture of trust that doesn't exist in other comparably big cities.

+1 for The Death of Ivan Ilyich, it's a marvelous example of an author depicting something you (probably) haven't experienced and nonetheless convincing you that's what it's really like.

Having this transactional a view of interactions doesn't sound fun. Is it something you're trying to change?

A somewhat rude answer may be that, despite being very old, University of Salamanca is not prestigious -- outside of the top 500 in all major global university rankings -- and is therefore more likely to be willing to employ somebody who can fake their way into appearing to be a high-impact researcher.

> If you believe you have a moral duty to be the best person you can then passing up that opportunity in favour of the facsimiles is morally wrong

Maybe a better statement would be that casual connections only offer facsimiles of the depth of a deep and long relationship, because the sheer accumulation of time and experiences with another person cannot be replaced quickly. However, you can also say that a deep and long relationship only offers a facsimile of the breadth of many shorter relationships, as one person can only offer so many things. If you change your passionate pursuit every decade, finding a partner with the same one each time might make that pursuit more fruitful. It's not how I personally feel, but "best person" is subjective like that.

I don't think strenholme is saying that those casual relationships are morally wrong, but that they're only facsimiles of the connection found in a deep and long relationship (especially one formed when young), and that pursuing facsimiles maybe brings you close enough to the original that you keep pursuing, but not close enough to ever approximate the original, and if what you miss is the original, then this is not a path to satisfaction.

> Can't be toxic culture if everyone wants to work there

Some counterarguments:

1) this only works if information flows out of the organization, but OpenAI has used NDAs to suppress criticism

2) OpenAI seems to me to polarize the people with the technical skills to work there, I think I'd bet that more of them are creeped out than eager

3) people, especially young people, are very capable of believing that being a jerk is the same as being hardcore is the same as being valuable

> You're either one of the few winners and get to live a comfortable life with a professional job, or you're off to WalMart or an Amazon warehouse, or Prison. The "kind of comfortable middle class life" is shrinking quickly. So it's not enough to just get straight A's. You need extra credit, get a 5.0 GPA, take all the "right" AP classes, have the "right" extracurriculars, and the "right" community service and so on. Otherwise you risk landing on the bad side of the career bimodal distribution.

This seems a little hyperbolic. The requirements you describe are probably true enough for top 20 universities, but they aren't true for top 100, and there still seem to be plenty of random white collar office jobs that hire people from merely medium-ranked universities.

Denmark values cultural homogeneity enough to mandate that children over the age of one in high-immigrant areas formally designated as ghettoes attend 25 hours per week of public daycare including instruction in "democracy, equality and major Danish holidays such as Christmas" under the threat of losing government benefits [1]. By western standards, this strikes me as a strong commitment to cultural homogeneity.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1IT1EN/

See, I don't like Sam Altman either, but this habit of criticizing people for their faces seems wrong-headed. Isn't it his behavior that we should be criticizing?

> Because they don't think about the consequences, and don't want to.

This is a dangerous way of thinking about people who disagree with you, because once you decide somebody is stupid, it frees you from ever having to seriously weigh their positions again, which is a kind of stupidity all its own.

Sucks that he had to do it, but the notion of Tom Waits making Rain Dogs and then pivoting to spending a bunch of time thinking about Doritos must be one of the funnier quirks of music history.

Gaming is perhaps more child-adjacent than other topics?

Man, I haven't thought about it in a while, but running in the dark is exhilarating, something about the blur of low light vision makes it feel much faster.

They're responding to a comment about playing tag across a college campus, not a park.

Having senior leadership and rank and file publicly proclaim their love for each other in identical ways, as happened during the leadership debacle, read cult-like to me.

That was compelling, albeit for reasons I can't seem to elucidate, kind of like Knausgaard, right down to the mystifying self-presentation as a sort of loser who nonetheless has many friends and lovers (though maybe everybody, if they were to give similarly complete and honest accounts of their lives, would come off as sort of losers, too).

Chatbots can be decent for unemotional steelmanning. It's nice to prod somebody's positions without getting worried about upsetting them. I have done this with no interest in tricking it into a "gotcha" moment.

I think it's a mistake to conflate amiable/nice with agreeing with you -- you're free to ask for criticism of your position, and it'll provide that politely.

I think there are a few categories of people:

1) People with rich and deep social networks. People in this category probably have pretty narrow use cases for AI companions -- maybe for things like therapy where the dispassionate attention of a third party is the goal.

2) People whose social networks are not as good, but who have a good shot at forming social connections if they put in the effort. I think this is the group to worry most about. For example, a teenager who withdraws from their peers and spends that time with AI companions may form some warped expectations of how social interaction works.

3) People whose social networks are not as good, and who don't have a good shot at forming social connections. There are, for example, a lot of old people languishing in care homes and hardly talking to anybody. An infinitely patient and available conversation partner seems like it could drastically improve the quality of those lives.