ramblenode

> No, I want management to develop a system to determine who is low-performing

The system here is going to be something like LoC or tickets answered, things that are objective and easy to measure. We know these don't reflect real productivity, but because they are objective, that's what will be used in promotion and firing decisions. Anything subjective, even if it's the opinions of peers or experts, will be contestable in due process hearings, creating risk for the employer, and will be deemphasized or eliminated. One reason why the US government and European software companies are relatively uncompetitive in hiring is because of the difficulties created by due process in firing bad employees and promoting good ones.

> Even then it’s hard to assess how severe the harms are for microplastics yet. Part of the reason is they’re clearly not overtly dangerous.

This is a contradiction.

I like the idea but I don't like the scoring. There's only two possibilities, so simply making a large number of guesses within the time limit is going to get you a high score. I want to see the ratio of correct to incorrect.

Unlike many commenters here, I actually read the article, and this quote seems to be the basis for the tenuous link between archeaology and geopolitics suggested by the title:

> The extent to which present-day politics hovers over China’s archaeological ambitions became clear during a Wall Street Journal reporter’s encounter with an Uzbek researcher at the ruins of an ancient Kushan city near Chinor. “Tell the Chinese that they will not find any traces of the Chinese here,” he said.

Kind of an interesting story if you can look past the attempt by WSJ to shoehorn in a geopolitcal angle.

> Asked whether Beijing could use the Yuezhi to make territorial claims, Wang said the notion was absurd because the nomads are a historical people and no one serious would put forth that argument.

"We're just asking questions", etc.

> The correlation does not mean the microplastics are the thing causing IBD. It probably means they are exasperating it for various reasons.

It doesn't even necessarily mean that microplastics are contributing to the harm. It could be that existing disease impairs the body's ability to eliminate microplastics.

Regardless, following the precautionary principle, we should treat them as a foreign toxin until the evidence suggests otherwise.

> It seems kind of lazy to observe that anecdotes contradict statistics, and then conclude that it's the statistics are wrong without providing any empirical evidence to the contrary.

Anecdotes are empirical evidence. Statistics are just collections of anecdotes obtained through systematized processes. As such, statistics are only as good as the process. 1 good observation can be better than 100 bad observations.

College admissisons tests were a typical thing at least half a century before the timeline presented in your article [0], [1]. In fact, the demand for standardized tests increased in the pre-war period because colleges wanted to broaden their base of students, which had largely become a Protestant elite. Even Harvard's admissions process from the 17th and 18th century was sensitive to designing a test that would not just select for those with privileged upbringings [0].

Historically, the alternative to admissions tests have been social admissions, where you are admitted based on class or family status. Despite all the problems with standardized tests, they are at least nominally meritocratic and independent of what an admissions committee thinks of your upbringing and heritage.

[0] https://commons.trincoll.edu/edreform/2014/05/accepted-the-e...

[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/609506/harvard-universit...

> But megafanua like moose or brown bears are still dangerous, even today.

They are dangerous to individual humans but they are a resource to groups of humans.

> Cognition is such a handwave IMO - what's the biochemistry behind that?

Hormones are chemical messengers. They exist to relay messages between different organs and tissues. An organism is constantly sampling its environment and adjusting its internal state to optimize survival and reproduction. Within this framework, it is not at all surprising that cognition interacts with hormones; in fact, it would be kind of surprising to find a biochemical pathway that is entirely independent of cognition.

A good example is stress. For those of us in the first world, stress begins as something cognitive, but it is expressed hormonally as increased serum cortisol. All you have to do to change your hormone balance is start ruminating!

Another example is oxytocin. If another human touches you affectionately, you'll see a bump in serum oxytocin. But it depends on your judgment of how affectionate the contact is, which is cognitive.

I don't think law of the excluded middle applies here.

> Applying this to education, I think that education needs to pivot explicitly to "solving problems" and not education for educations sake. e.g .The student needs to be engaged with a problem and reaches for AI as a tool to solve it and, as a result, up level their understanding.

It seems you are thinking of project-based learning. That is a great way to learn, but it only works when you have a certain level of baseline knowledge within the "zone of proximal development" to what the task requires. And even then, it does not replace other kinds of learning for developing expertise.

Think of asking a 5th grader to implement the FFT within a programming langauge of their choice. They wouldn't understand the problem, wouldn't know where to begin, and would probably learn very little. But they could still ask Claude or ChatGPT for an answer and there's a good chance it would be pretty close.

For a curious and motivated student, AI is an amplifier---similar to how you were using Claude. But most students just want to finish the task, in which case the more powerful the AI, the less the student needs to know to get a result. These students are not using the AI as a tutor or to fill in gaps in their knowledge. They are just copy-pasting the assignment into the prompt and pasting the output as the answer. That is not learning, and it can be done with projects too.

> If a huge mechanism for assessing folks in education is "write an essay on this" and the teacher then "grades the essay output by the student," that's almost the perfect task where AI can do both ends. Which is pretty much a sign that assessments such as this have low educational impact.

Not at all. It's a sign that AI can do the task.

> In most places across the world homeownership is a dream.

AFAIK this is more a phenomenon of Western urban areas than the world in general. Even in very poor countries home ownership is normal (and for men it can be a de facto requirement for getting married).

Congress can delegate decisions to expert bodies, and often does. But Congress is also quite comfortable simply legislating a solution, which may be ill-informed or with ulterior intent.

Speaking of planes, Congress took a direct role in the design specifications of the F-35 to the detriment of that program. Notably, they required a common airframe that could support VTOL, despite objections from the Army, Navy, and Air Force (the USMC wanted it and lobbied for it). This greatly added to the complexity and cost of the program.

Certainly the US has more logistics experience in actual wars, but it's unclear whether it would matter that much in a US-China war.

A US-China war would most likely be fought in the South China Sea. Most of China's supply train would be moving through China, whereas most of the US's supply train would be moving half way around the world through open ocean. It's not clear why the lack of Chinese experience fighting overseas wars or the US's experience moving materiel through uncontested ocean against non-peer adversaries would apply here.

Remember, the last time the US fought a war without uncontested sea routes and naval superiority was WWII.

> The USA will remove that single factory within the first weeks of any conflict.

I don't think it's clear that a war would necessarily escalate to attacking industrial targets because there is a kind of MAD at play.

From America's point of view, the problem with escalating the war to industrial targets (which I am sure US military planners realize) is that the US has an Achilles' heel in it's reliance on petrol. Almost all US petrol comes from only 130 domestic plants. If those are disabled, most US supply chains will crumble, including food. No need to disable all the factories when there's no way to transport stuff and workers aren't fed. That weakness might be enough to deter the US from striking Chinese industry.

EVs might be one of the bigger bulwarks the US could pursue toward greater national security.

China doesn't need to take a beach in the first phase. If they gain sea superiority, they can blockade the island and eventually exhaust anti-air defenses with drones until they gain air superiority. At that point defenders wouldn't be able to mass to defend a beach.

> the USA is VERY competent at deploying to and fighting wars.

I don't think you can extrapolate fighting in Kosovo, Afghanistan, or Iraq to fighting China. If a war were to break out, both sides would be learning a lot of lessons very quickly.

There is no clear path to a general android. Every physical task that has been automated with robots requires robots engineered specifically for that task. Engineering, building, and maintaining those robots is a massive expense and only happens for tasks that are lucrative and occur at scale. Much of the economy is in a long tail of tasks that would not be profitable to automate, barring a major revolution in robotics.

If you think the average American supermarket has every kind of meat, cheese, drink, and vegetable, you are in for a big surprise traveling the world.

In many ways American markets have fallen behind relatively poorer countries in variety. Most of what is sold are monocultures and packaged foods. The selection of fresh produce (or any produce) is often disappointing.

Nicotine use without smoking raises heart rate, constricts blood vessels, raises blood pressure, and remodels the cardiovascular system and individual cells. Those cardiovascular changes are associated with stroke and dementia. It stimulates the mesolimbic dopamine system which causes downregulation of dopamine receptors, addiction, and feeling less good when you aren't ingesting nicotine.

Here is an overview: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8026694/

> A RCT does not establish causality. That's essentially my point. A single study/experiment never proofs causality. You need a theory to explain the causality and multiple studies that falsify other possible causality mechanisms.

This might be a good heuristic for assigning confidence to results, but in theory, an RCT absolutely does establish causality, assuming internal, external, construct, and statistical validity of the study.

Multiple studies may not be better than one good study (assuming the above), which can be tested by looking at the leverage in a meta-anlaysis.

Having a theory is kind of orthogonal to a study finding a true positive result. Almost every published study, true or false, invokes some kind of theory, true or false. There is a joke in the soft sciences along the lines that you make up a new theory for every study.

Imagination has been found to activate the same V1 cortex that vision does. The V1 cortex is retinotopic, so individual neurons (or at most small groups) act like pixels. There are approximately 280 million V1 neurons, so the neuroanatomical resolution of the visual cortex is much greater than 500x500.

This may not be the resolution we perceive as we imagine, but perception involves many additional systems and bottlenecks (notably, one can train oneself to have a more acute imagination, and there are people who report their imagination to be as acute as their vision).

> What is the base level of variance in college applications?

Yes, none of the other questions or speculations even matter until this is sorted out. The article even mentions Columbia's applications increased 10% in the same season.

That an entire news article can be written about a simple percent change without including a confidence interval is poor reflection of our collective data literacy.

That's basically how driving was sold to the American public in the 1950s. The reality is that transportation is a network, and driving is only efficient for the individual driver at a relatively low level of density. The bigger the population and the more people who drive, the less efficient the network. If you try to keep the network efficient, then driving acts as a constraint on the rest of societal development and you end up with sprawl and long transit times. Driving doesn't scale beyond a certain point (as you know, by suggesting expensive tunnels).

As for the freedom aspect, to get anywhere in an American suburb-styled society you are required to own and maintain a car, a major personal expense. When you travel somewhere, you have to find a place to safely park your car, and your person is tethered to where you park your car, usually needing to return there in a reasonable amount of time the same day, or else paying for long-term parking. You have to have a license from the government to use the only practical source of transportation, and if you don't have that license, you are effectively shut off from any autonomy. Cars certainly do increase the freedom to move and experience the world in some ways, but that is at the cost of other freedoms.

> Why wait until TikTok breaks the law to ban them?

Why wait until a homeless guy steals some bread to throw him in jail?

The foundation of the rule of law is that the law applies to everyone equally, not arbitrarily. That includes a presumption of no wrongdoing and due process.

It should be mentioned that TikTok already has its full US data and source code audited by Oracle, a level of scrutiny higher than any of the domestic tech companies. Combined with the FBI and NSA watching them like a hawk, if they were breaking the law, it would be old news by now.

> Not sure why you're discounting the potential for foreign influence campaigns from reducing the accountability your government has to you.

People often bring up this point, and yet if China poured every resource they had available into spreading chaos and disinformation, it would not touch what domestically-sourced influence campaigns are currently achieving.

You might say that, nonetheless, it's a step in the right direction. But when disinformation and manipulation is as ubiquitous as it is now, the real effect of this law will simply be to protect informal alliances between legislators, media companies, and intelligence agencies. There's a handful of things they all agree on (which may not be in your best interest), and this law helps make sure conversations about those things never gain traction.

> You can’t hold TikTok legally accountable.

Sure you can. You follow the law or you are banned from doing business. This law just skipped the first part because the authors didn't want to write any actual regulations.

Another important detail that has been burried in this discussion is that in the late aughts and early 10s there was a lot of domestic political pressure against US companies building products that could facillitate Great Firewall censorship. At the time that was a bigger concern than being allowed into the Chinese market.

All the talk of a digital services trade war/import ban ignores that US tech companies were facing a de facto export ban from the US side by being prohibited from complying with Chinese regulations.

It's disputed whether even modern ethanol production is energy-positive. But trying to start an entire biofuels production chain from scratch would certainly not be net positive, as you would need to already have mechanized agriculture and a petrochemical industry to get that efficiency.

Coal liquefaction would probably be superior to biofuels, as it seems we will give up using it before it is depleted.

Why not also ban Instagram? Its algorithm is not categorically less harmful than TikTok's. And its parent company has been known to sell Americans' data to foreign brokers and intelligence analysts.

What many of us who opposed this ban are frustrated about is that there are major underlying problems with all large social media companies, and the "foreign adversary" angle gives these companies cover to keep abusing their users just because they happen to be incorporated in the right country.

Most of the TikTok concerns could have been subsumed in a user-rights bill that prevented data from being shared with third parties and limited the scope of what an algo-feed could do under Section 230's safe harbor. Of course, this would have required some real legislating that would have upset some very large donors, so we get the "foreign adversary" bill instead.