padastra

Lol, I want to know how many people out there ordering Seamless because they’re too lazy to pick up the food are arguing they would have had an easier life chasing down an antelope with a 14-hour jog across the plain and dragging the several hundred lb corpse back to the tribe.

I don’t know, maybe this is just nostalgia, but HN used to be a “oh cool, you managed to do this / build this / achieve this” and “look at what they’re doing that’s interesting” — and now it’s become much much more like reddit where it’s “you / they were only able to do this because of X, and my life is miserable because of A, B, and C factors outside of my control, society sucks, I’m sure I would have had a better life as a hunter-gatherer[1].”

[1] Not even joking, this is an actual reply.

Reddit and HN skews to the perennially online, who are composed of people that believe work should be easy, fulfilling, highly paid, and most of all: optional. They also think this is the natural state of nature and it’s everyone else’s fault that it is not so.

I don’t disagree with you on a personal level, but it is worth noting that “social disgust” is what has driven down tobacco rates as a population, even if it’s perhaps less effective for any one individual than empathy, etc.

These differences exist conceptually, but my guess is if you did a factor reduction on actual behavior they would all be correlated nearly 100%.

How skewed do you think it would have to be for the mean stay to be “short” eg 2-3 years, given the upper bound of human lifetime?

This is one of those things that sounds smart but fails the common sense test.

A few hospitals now have urgent care and ERs right next to each other, with a triage nurse in front saying which area to go to. That seems like a good system. I obviously agree with you that people can’t be expected to perfectly discriminate which they should go to.

The root of my comment was to defend the availability of ER services against someone who literally suggested that ERs were not needed for anyone who didn’t arrive by ambulance or by police, not to argue the specifics of his child’s case for which neither one of us have any real knowledge.

I am sorry about your wife’s experience. It contributes to making healthcare discussions so challenging, because there are incredibly emotional, stressful, and unfair situations in each direction (people who got billed tens of thousands on one side; people who were not diagnosed on the other) — including in countries with socialized medicine.

I would suggest that your wife would have been best served not by an ER doctor, but by a highly trained and thoughtful primary care physician who could have followed her and understood what she’s going through longitudinally. Sadly, we burden medical students with $200K in debt and then ask them to choose between a high-paying good-lifestyle specialty or a low-paying poor-lifestyle specialty.

And then one layer down, the primary issue is it’s hard to pay PCPs more when 99.5% of their visits are for common colds, medication renewals, knee pain, etc. and 0.5% of their visits make huge impacts (e.g. diagnosis of cancer early). Just like trying to discriminate urgent care vs. ER, how does one know which patients to send to an NP who can take care of routine issues, and which to send to a PCP with a better understanding of complex issues including management of multiple specialists’ recommendations.

He described that he was able to go to urgent care for his daughter for a quick fix and the ER was not necessary for them (and the urgent care doctor who saw them must have agreed or they would have been sent back to the ER). What conclusion should I have come to?

Amazing. I agree that the ER was not necessary for your daughter, but am impressed you can extrapolate that one experience to the entire set of patients with heart failure, pneumonia, sepsis, pyelonephritis, appendicitis, intestinal obstruction, gastrointestinal bleeds, electrolyte disorders, fractures, NSTEMIs, and many others who are not wheeled in by police / paramedics but need urgent complex diagnostics and imaging. What deep understanding and wisdom you hold, and with such high confidence too.

Sorry, people are downvoting this because it is out of the Overton window of acceptable discourse, and the fact that it happens to be true is irrelevant.

The probability that the DOJ would investigate / prosecute this particular bias is near zero. Where I work, if you submit a bad review for an underrepresented minority you will get a call from HR asking “are you absolutely sure? You don’t think that’s too low?” (even if you also submitted good reviews for other employees of that racial group).

What’s funny is: in five years researchers looking at the data will say “oh! There’s a higher attrition rate / poor performance even though prior reviews marked them as good! THAT must be where all this systemic racism we are trying to find is!”

There are many states where minimum wage for workers is above the federal $2.13 (actually, a bit more than half): https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped

This whole $2 thing is bullshit that’s carried forward if you’re the average HN reader in a coastal city. My friends who are waiters across a spectrum of restaurants (in a coastal city) probably make $50-60 an hour, and double that at the higher end places, for a job that yes, can be exhausting (but not exceptionally more so than many other low-skill jobs), and requires no specific training or degree.

You should ask yourself how you can be so self-assured yet wrong by several orders of magnitude. I'm not saying that as an insult -- it's probably worth re-evaluating your confidence : accuracy relationship.

That's been crossed long ago...

At some level of incompetence, you might ask whether the underlying assumptions are wrong -- for example, perhaps they're looking for excuses to reduce internet access more generally.

Just FYI, like most studies of behaviors and their causes in large populations, the hypothesis that lead exposure resulted in more crime is not proven, see e.g.: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5801257/

My priors (from a Bayesian perspective) that lead, which in high doses provably can result in brain damage, can have more subtle effects on behavioral inhibition and executive function is pretty high, but I still do not know that I would feel confident saying the evidence is clear.

Have you ever, in your life, considered that you may sometimes be wrong?

Do you think Mao just forcibly hoisted the Cultural Revolution on the populace, or did he just take advantage of a sentiment that was sweeping the times?

Or a softer version: do you think McCarthy in the U.S. was potentially dangerous, or will our democracy inherently protect us against being too extreme for all time?

My parents grew up during the Cultural Revolution. I'm slightly modifying some terminology so the parallels become more clear (original terminology was in Mandarin anyways, so...):

It started off as pro-equality and for the people. Then, any evidence that you are outperforming others in a "capitalist" way became evidence that you are anti-equality and therefore against the people. This quickly devolved into merit not being determined by a willingness to pay (the cornerstone of economics) to merit being determined by virtue-signaling and connections (the cornerstone of politics). As many other posters have mentioned, this is a poor way to judge merit and soon beliefs come up against reality. When this happens reality always wins and things that become dependent on higher-productivity (in modern society, this is almost all things) collapse.

I see a lot of parallels. For the left, the structures of capitalism and racism are intertwined. In this article, the author gives examples of how being a white male and doing well is itself evidence of soft-racism. These parents are noticing that in corporate boards, medical schools, law schools, elite colleges across the country, merit is determined not by accomplishments but by virtue-signaling (note: this is not the same as Affirmative Action; one is boosting entrance rates for Blacks, American Indians, and Latinos/Latinas, the other is saying "only this type of White person who has acknowledged that racism/capitalism is inherent to their accomplishments is allowed").

Assuming these beliefs come to dominate American power structures in the next 20 years (more than in the past 20), I am quite worried. Some structural anti-racism might be a net good. Heck, America has a lot of room to move to the left and a bit more equality may also be a net good -- McCarthyism was much more extreme in the other direction, after all. But historically, this cult-like faith-based groupthink where dissension and alternate beliefs are seen as evil has not turned out well; reality always wins over beliefs.

I don’t understand why the author insists on being willing to speak with future journalists. He’s a smart person who seems to have come down with a serious case of the dumbs.

In your story, you are the unfortunate recipient of a shit stick from everyone:

- your brother, a successful attorney who lied to the police to commit you

- your shelter, who kicked you out randomly without cause (people who run and work at shelters are generally well-intended

- your roommate, who literally attacked you with a knife completely randomly

- your lawyer, and potentially the surgeon he recommended

- the chiropractor

- the other driver

Each is believable, especially the chiropractor, but you’re essentially the completely passive and no-fault recipient of a giant shit stick from like 7 different people in short order.

I hate to ask this but do you think it’s possible there’s some common thread here? Your past behavior, mental health, drug use (and thus being exposed to people who attack others with knives during disputes), etc?

Do you believe you’re representative of the population of homeless people (ie are their origin stories similar in nature to yours)?

Also, what life circumstances led to you sharing a motel room with a person who, out of nowhere, rushed at people with a knife? Had this person done similar acts prior to you / have they since / was there a dispute / were there drugs?

Good thing he wrote a book on leadership while making this decision!

The equity / social justice movement in the U.S. represents a drag on progress. We will be overtaken by much worse governments like China as a result.