46 karma · joined May 11, 2018
Big Tech companies are not a real estate business. To believe that they are indicates extreme confusion about what a company like Netflix does. To shoehorn them into culpability for rent seeking in the housing market is to substantially miss the point.
As a rule, when people try to remove inequality everybody gets poorer, not richer. Countries are more successful at reducing poverty when they focus on lifting all boats. India and China were communist countries in the mid 20th century. As a result of them abandoning that approach, we have seen the greatest poverty reduction in human history. Check the GINI coefficients of those countries, it isn't great. Ask Chinese/Indian citizens if they are wealthier now than 60 years ago and its not even a question.
Submitting a fake paper to a journal read by a few dozen academics is a threat to someones ego. It is not in the same ballpark as a threat to IT infrastructure everywhere.
Resumes or similar self-marketing says a lot less than we would like. If there were good signals here, hiring would be a solved problem.
Another thing not mentioned here is that employee productivity is a variable that is almost always invisible before the hire happens. Leonardo DiCaprio can command a premium because he is identified with the work he does. This is not the case for tech workers who's work is typically invisible. Suppose you are a 10x DevOps sorcerer. None of your potential employers will know that in advance, so they are all only willing to pay 1x salaries.
FAANG companies pay higher across the board, not because they want to, but in the hope that by overpaying 90% of their employees (relative to market) they will be able to attract top 10% candidates whose skills are hidden until after the hire happens. If they could price discriminate in advance they would.
If the situation is not novel, then this step is only useful for documentation. If this is uncharted territory, any spec with this level of specificity will be thrown out in seconds.
A model that does not incorporate all the relevant information will have more false positives. The practical consequence of doing what you suggest is, cetaris-paribus, that you will incorrectly penalize more people.
> There might be a correlation in aggregate data but in any individual case we can only look at the relevant facts.
Definitely. Thats where courts and human review come in. The mistake the Dutch made here was not the variables in the model, but that they had limited human review of a model with (I'm assuming) low predictive power.
> Our justice system is supposed to be “innocent until proven guilty”, not “innocent until Bayesian inference suggests high enough probability.”
"Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" (or whatever the Dutch equivalent is) implies exactly the Bayesian calculation you are rejecting. That said, I agree that a machine learning model with limited inputs is not sufficient to determine guilt.
We would deploy enormous resources to protect something if IT believed that had a legal requirement to do so (and make a lot of noise about how "secure" we were), but we would leave treasure chests of information sitting around in the open if there wasn't a box they needed to check saying "don't leave unattended treasure chests of private data in the open."
If anything this convinced me that the regulations surrounding this sort of thing are a joke. We don't need rules about security or how to build X - IT will just see a list of boxes, check them, and then ignore everything not specifically enumerated. We need a white hat law for certifying hacking teams that can legally try to crack corporations with sensitive data. If they succeed, the company has to pay enormous fines _to the team that hacked them_ and solve the problem or get their certifications/contracts revoked.
“Growth is only good if widely shared” is a meme that has led to immiseration every time it is implemented. If capitalism has to own child labor, then redistributionists have to own the violent mass scale enslavement of the peasants under Mao/Stalin.
The problem isn't lack of knowledge or skill, it is that management refuses to commit the resources necessary to build secure products. When the difference between building secure X and not-secure X is often 2-3 times the effort and time commitment, managers will almost always pick not-secure X and roll the dice on nothing going wrong.
From their point of view, adding security does nothing for the product. The customers are paying for the value-prop and marginal improvements on it, not the integrity of the backend.
If you want to solve the problem of lax security, you need to make security breaches a buisness-ending proposition. You also need to increase the likelyhood of being compromised so that people aren't tempted to roll the dice. If you want regulation, I would support some kind of white hat law that says if you compromise sensitive company data, the corporation has to (1) pay an amazon-bankrupting amount of money and (2) they have to give 20% of it to the team that broke them.
Aside from the transistor, negative feedback, Unix, troff, radio astronomy, the charge coupled device, cryptography, information theory, what did Bell Labs ever do for us? [1]
By the standard you set forward, we would have shut down Bell Labs BECAUSE it started to create these unquantifiably valuable inventions.
Google makes absurd amounts of money by search. Is it unethical to create an amazing search engine? Would it be better if Google said: "We aren't going to put money into moonshots, cancer research, laying fiber in Kansas, internet broadcasting balloons, AI research etc. We are going to take all of the money and pay it back to shareholders."?
I believe that your proposal, if put into practice, would amount to "we should destroy products that are successful". What am I missing?
The real myth is that "everyone has the capacity for success," and people who don't have success are "kept down by the system." These are feel good stories. If the only thing keeping everyone from eudaimonia is a broken system, then we fix the system and, presto, everything is great.
The hard pill to swallow is that differential life outcomes stem largely from differential capacities.
https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0...
Can you explain to me how exactly this is "soft core phone sex"? Am I unconsciously gay for fish-men?
What you are talking about does happen, but I think you are painting with waay too broad a brush.
Nobody should be in a position where they have to say "that's a podcast" in order to defend the NYT.
""" [Facebook] thinks about free speech the way the US govt. thinks about free speech. There is no rule that that has to be the case... A way of avoiding the choice [about who to censor] altogether is to say free speech is protected in the public sphere so we are going to protect it in the private sphere...
We speak about facebook as if it is a democracy, something that has to have a consistent set of values that it applies equally... and there is some principle of fairness and equality that it must apply... facebook is acting as if it is constrained by these American notions... In countries like Germany there are strict hate speech laws. Facebook could be more like Germany...
We are asking Zuckerburg to accept the power he has and use it wisely, and he is reluctant to do that... Zuckerburg has to solve this problem that he has created, and if he cant solve it or isn't willing to solve it, maybe he shouldn't have all this power. """[1]
The NYT is criticizing facebook for having fair and egalitarian values, and all but calling for regulation if facebook doesn't censor views the NYT doesn't like.
The NYT has a HUGE conflict of interest when it comes to facebook. It also has a doubly huge interest in regulating speech, if they can get the government to force companies to de-list NYT's competitors under the guise of fake news that is a huge win for them. Nowhere was that disclosed in this podcast. Under your criteria, that makes this fake news. Should facebook remove links to this podcast now?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/podcasts/the-daily/facebo...
Is there any conceivable evidence for this view that would be compelling to you? Is there a possible state of life outcomes that cannot be explained by pointing at "the system"?
> Motivated reasoning requires a motivation
Suppose X says to Y, "you are desperate for claim Z to be true." I think a strait-forward reading implies that X has some motivation to believe in Z independent of Z's truth value. No claim regarding the nature of the motive is necessary.
Did AEI shoe-horn in their pet theories into the analysis? Sure. On the other hand, does Bruenig (or anyone) believe that holding a job is casually independent from the sets of behavioral traits that lead people into failing high school and becoming teen parents?
> that culture emerges from the same society you're desperate to exonerate
Accusations of motivated reasoning cut both ways. He could say that you seem just as desperate to implicate society as he is to exonerate it.
If women choose their profession based on factors other than salary, it is a little strange to analogize them to black people under segregation. Just because someone has different values doesn't mean that they have false consciousness or are acting under duress.
It strikes me as strange that the administrators would just take down a library given a bevy of cheap and easy solutions and then lie about it. Is it possible? Sure. But unless I get some kind of evidence of that, my prior is to be very suspicious of claims like 'X is possible, cheap and easy, and the only reason someone doesn't do X is because they are bad.'
> Requesting ADA compliance almost always leads to a net social gain and even when it does lead to a loss, that's not the fault of the requester
Not obvious considering the frequency of [predatory ADA lawsuits](https://www.dailynews.com/2017/05/24/ada-lawsuit-abuse-remai...). In the case of large companies that border on public utilities I would agree with you. In the case of smaller companies the cost of compliance could easily be greater than social gain.
I would like to edit my original post to reflect this, but unfortunately it seems like I can't edit it anymore.
If it turns out that this can be done, I'll concede that the bootcamp was in the wrong and my arguments in this case were incorrect.
If, however, this is prohibitively expensive then things change. E.g. A quick google search led to the hourly cost of an ASL interpreters being between $50-$145 per hour. Assume $100/hr, 5 hr days, 5 days/week, 4wks/month, for a 3 month program and the cost is $30,000 which significantly higher than bootcamp tuition. I don't think it is a trivial thing to force small companies to take customers that create losses in excess of 10K.
Of course, this also depends on how "small" the bootcamp is. If, e.g. it is a huge machine with thousands of students then this could be a reasonable expectation.
2) Yes you are correct. See my above edit.
I accept that arson metaphor was a hyperbolic in the sense that arson is illegal and requesting ADA compliance is legal. However, if the end result of both things is a net social loss, then the analogy holds in that respect.
It may be reasonable for large institutions to have dedicated personnel for less than one percent of their customers given that their customer base is so large. That calculation becomes financially unworkable in smaller organizations.
The fact that you resort to ad-hominem without addressing the example is telling. It terrifies me that people endorse the de-facto destruction of a commons just because a tiny fraction of the population can't use it.
EDIT: Some have pointed out that saying an argument is disgusting is not ad-homanim. This is correct, and I was wrong to use it in that way. However, I stand by the second part of the last paragraph.
1) It isn't the bootcamp's fault that speech to text software sucks. 2) What is the state of affairs that would have made the situation better for you? Either (1) they write their own non-sucky speech to text software or (2) they hire a whole new interpreter just for you and only for the duration of the camp. Neither of these things are financially or logistically reasonable expectations. 3) Bootcamps aren't a golden ticket into tech. Build your own portfolio of projects and you will be just as hirable as fresh bootcamp grads.
UC Berkeley had an online public library of lectures but it wasn't subtitled. When someone used the ADA to sue, Berkeley was faced with the enormous cost to either subtitle their entire library or take it down. Of course, they took it down, and now nobody can access the lectures. Don't be the person who burns down someone else's house just because you don't have one.