266 karma · joined September 1, 2015
Go on Google Maps and look at a city like Montreal and you'll see that the streets are very rectangular.
Look at a city like Paris and you'll see a spiderweb instead of rectangles.
Imagine yourself back in a time where a flood or some random "act of god" could destroy your harvest and make it so you and your whole family died of hunger through no fault of your own (or anyone else's).
Today, thanks to centuries of improvements, one doesn't have to know how to build a house or even how to acquire food or clean water.
These things are given even to people who do nothing but drink and play video games all day on government dime.
Do you realize? We live in a time and place where not being basically given food, water, sanitation and shelter, even for contributing absolutely nothing of value is seen as shocking.
And then, some of the people from that time and place go on this crazy thing that allows them to communicate with half the population of the world in realtime and complain about "barely keeping afloat"!
The very notion would have been laughable 100 years ago. Hell, it's disconnected from the reality of even a large part of the world TODAY.
Is the second also systemic discrimination? Can Joe the Down syndromer talk about systemic discrimination in having no chance at being the POTUS?
He did give an anecdote as evidence, but the claim he was justifying was that:
> This kind of observation ("high status women are more likely to leave for family reasons therefore it is an economically rational choice to prefer men, given equal skills") seems logical on the surface, but when you start looking into the nuances of real life it just doesn't hold.
This is too strong a statement to be described as merely "stating it's an observation from personal experience".
Anyway, what's nice is that this is a forum and another commenter might answer with the data if such data/argument exists.
What do you mean by bias? As far as I can tell, in the context of gender differences, either the bias IS the discrimination or it is the cause of the discrimination, but I can't make heads or tails of what it'd mean the way you worded it (or, for that matter, why it's relevant here if you just meant the swapped version).
> If your argument is that there is also discrimination against men, the vast majority of feminists agree. Its just clear in terms of wages and gender ratios in jobs, men have the upper hand :)
First, I'm totally confused by the smiley face. Maybe you just meant to imply 'no hard feelings' which makes the display understandable, but it's at any rate a confusing thing to "read" in context.
Now, my argument is not actually that there is discrimination against men. Well, I'm also not saying that there isn't, I'm just saying that my argument is on a different point, but if anything I'm bet there's some sort of evidence of "discrimination" against just about every one characteristic/group.
Actually, I didn't really make a specific argument, but if I had to, it would be something along the lines of: evidence of differing treatment (particularly statistical differences) could actually be evidence of differences between groups.
Like let's suppose that males just don't, on average, care about veterinary science. Maybe it's something that should be incentivized against, maybe not.
But if it's true, one would expect that someone will interpret that hypothetical fact as "males are not good veterinarians" and basically legitimately discriminate against male applicants (and probably there's going to also be people who would believe that males are going into vet science less only because of this discrimination). In this hypothetical world, both of those groups would be anywhere from quite wrong to slightly right, depending on what truth means to the beholder.
At any rate, a corollary of this is that even evidence of discrimination doesn't refute the underlying assumption to the degree that we might expect.
I don't know if you're saying that "the juice is made with 100% real oranges" (A) or if you're saying that "the juice is 100% made of real oranges" (B).
In our situation, this maps to:
A) Although there exists evidence on both sides, the balance of discrimination has been, through history until now, unquestionably to the favor of white men
B) All the evidence that exists shows discrimination against non-(white men). No evidence of (white men) exists.
Now, if you're saying A, then I agree, except that this seems to entail that in order to legitimately complain about "reverse discrimination" essentially requires that men be confined to the household or that whites be slaves respectively (or some sort of equivalent), for a few hundred years before the complaint can be made.
So, it seems more reasonable to me to assume that you mean B, or at least something closer to B. I don't get what the "long history" part of "all the evidence […] points to a long history of discrimination" is for however, since hypothetically when we get to a point of no discrimination whatsoever, history would still show a tally favoring white men the way I understand the way people tally things up.
Anyway, the truth is that evidence is never that one-sided. Here's[1] for example an article explaining that in veterinary science, over 90% of students are female. The university responded by opening a scholarship favouring men as a group and (some) students responded that this was actually perpetuating male privilege.
The argument here isn't even about male privilege. Even if every single other field of study was 90% male or something like that (for the record, it is not, vet science is not the only female-dominated field), you'd just have a situation where everything is pro-male except veterinary science and one may call that male privilege, sure. But there would still be evidence of (limited) male "discrimination" in vet science.
[1] http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/sydney-university-d...
The uncomfortable thing is that this can cut both ways. Things can and do get rejected because it doesn't fit the ideology.
Feynman called it Cargo Cult science:
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways
we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron
by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know
not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value
for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements
of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of
time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a
little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that,
until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing
that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people
did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's,
they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason
why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value
they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far
off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now
we don't have that kind of a disease.
But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves--of having utter
scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically
included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.
The paper you cite says that most published research is false.
You infer from this that published research is no better than no source.
But this is wrong! If published research is true 30% of the time, but people's intuitions (on questions research is published on) are so only say 10% of the time, then going with published papers is a better choice.
I'd like to know if people feel, after reading TFA (or the psychology literature), how likely it is that people are wrong most of the time on important questions.
My understanding of whataboutism is that it must be an attempt to deflect from some problem that the user doesn't want to address. Like if one is a racist and say 'oh but what about children in country X'. And even then, there are ways to interpret what I just wrote unfavorably due to the plethora of possible definitions of the * isms (is it subtle bias or is it fear/hate of, or etc.).
Anyway, the point I would make is that I think your argument about what to prioritize is shaped around the conclusion you want to reach. Consider this: why should I prioritize my fellow countrymen/westerners of another race over my fellow human beings from another country?
Because they are closer or more akin to me? If so, why not care about people even closer to me: my family and my 'tribe'?
What I'm describing is what is generally seen as conservatism and I expect that it is even seen as either actual bigotry/racism/etc or at least related to it, yet your argument for the 'opposite side' is very similar. Or, if you prefer, what might be said to be racist about an argument against caring for other races could be said to be xenophobic about yours, in a way (I'm not trying to insult you, but rather trying to point out a case of repugnant conclusion).
But anyway, the whole topic is vast and I realize that I've contradicted my own recommendation of emphasizing solutions, so here is my attempt at that: it could be that there are ways to improve race relations that are either the most effective ways to improve the world or that also happen to benefit everyone's ingroup and if those exist then I encourage people to focus on sharing those.
As for more contentious solutions, I have no idea yet. I have seen too many life skill assessment surveys and such to believe that pure 'system 2' solutions (to use Kanehman's nomenclature) will ever work: most people are what Kahneman would call 'lazy thinkers' and I'm fairly convinced that the *isms are merely consequences of such cognitive biases. Short of genetic engineering or separating groups into nations based on their group identity, I don't know what could work.
And this segues into my response to you: as you said, it is very hard for some people to just "up and ignore politics for a while".
What I feel you are missing however is that there is a very perverse mirror effect: as a white guy (which I assume from your comment you are not), drinking from the social justice firehose is like basking in anti-white male hate (remember that just like not every white male is a racist and a sexist, not every advocate for social justice is immune from similar hateful beliefs targeted at the former group).
One difference is that you're supposed to like it. Or at least a white male who's a "good person" is.
Now, I don't know to what extent both situations are similar or different, I've only ever experienced one side of it (and all the minority friends I ever asked couldn't relay experiences that approach the level of severity people imply on the Internet. But maybe that's because Québec/Ontario is a very different place than wherever you live, or maybe I just don't know the right people).
> something that others can't just do whenever they want, something that really is a luxury compared to the way others are forced by our society to live
I don't really know how to frame this, but I think it's worth noting that in fact, no matter what you've experienced, you still live a luxurious life yourself by today's world standards.
Indeed, if you make just 18k $/year, you're part of the world's richest 10%.
If you have Internet, then you're part of the 40% of people lucky enough to do so.
In many countries today, female foeticides (that is, killing babies because they are not males) is a reality. In other places, young boys are used as sex toys. In a few Islamic countries in Africa (Sudan and Chad are the 2 I remember offhand), actual chattel slavery is still a thing today.
I guess the point I am trying to make is that probably all of us who can comment on HN live in a bubble (certainly some bubbles are inside others however).
And I think it's easy for all of us to look at bubbles inside our own and "take a week off" from problems which do not affect us directly. Heck, I've seen videos of crazy stuff and I'm writing about it here and I still don't really grasp that people actually get stoned to death for adultery.
In perspective, it feels to me like the plight of marginalized people in western countries is akin to a rich lawyer complaining to Bill Gates about how unfair it is that he can't afford a small island himself while ordering a burger from a minimum wage cashier.
I think your 'error' here was approaching a topic that is [post-facto] obviously sensitive in a normal (i.e.: less than sensitive) manner.
People get very polarized about politics[1] and your comments signaled you as being in opposition in some form wrt the "women's rights" position but did NOT virtue signal against their outgroup.
Consequently, your argument was interpreted as being pro-outgroup, hence the "you're a neckbeard"-style attacks.
Be more careful about sensitive topics next time.
[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/
[2] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
Why would Autopilot have a warning for frontal collisions but not for rear collisions? And why would Autopilot be speed-limited and all that if it was able to use launch mode to avoid a rear collision?
Alternative hypothesis: it's simple denial, much like Nokia and more recently RIM.
But they are the primary source of the net emissions or, in other words, the increase of CO2 levels.
It's a bit like if your neighbor produces just enough grain for a year's worth of food for his family of 10 and you steal just enough for yourself. Technically, you aren't the primary source of the decrease in food, but you are the primary (and only) source of the fact that your neighbor's food supply are lower than needed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWXoRSIxyIU
http://whatsyourimpact.org/greenhouse-gases/carbon-dioxide-e...
https://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natu...
https://www.netl.doe.gov/research/coal/carbon-storage/carbon...
But in the grand scheme of things, we can't rely on such a mechanism, because the consequences are not proportional to the causal actions.
As an example, ask yourself this: what proportion of people would be ready to, say, pay twice as much for electricity if it meant that 1 million people/year less would die in some African country?
What I mean by visibility is that you can't fudge it, that reality is plainly visible to all actors.
Income is not visible directly (although what one's house looks like for example is visible and is a good indication of income). If you meet a well-dressed guy in a Starbucks, you have no idea whether he's crippled with debt or whether he has so much money he doesn't know what to do with. And that's true regardless of the fact that income is regulated by the government, that banks keep records and all that.
Software is NOT visible in that sense: whether your microwave is running code that will make it explode when you type in 9999 or not, is not something that can be known by everyone but the first person who has access to the device, let alone the public who couldn't understand how to compare two hashes anyway.
As far as any third party is concerned, Tesla could just be faking logs and no one would know. Actually, you may not see it still, so imagine that say, GM, suddenly releases an autonomous car and it crashes. Do you trust them when they tell you that the logs say the driver was at fault?
Because it will be obvious that it was modified, even to journalists, the public and a jury of your peers. Also the cops, who will arrest you for it.
But there is no such visibility for software.
Eventually, (and with a lot of handwaving) the difference converges towards 0 and the network gives the right answer.
What you said makes sense, but it is only convincing if you already trust the scientific institutions and believe in reductionism. And that, is unfortunately much less common than we would think.
The guy believes that there are poisons in everyday products, telling them that "damage from an endless assortment of factors cause cells to enter disease states" is not at all a refutation of their belief taken from their point of view. In fact, I expect that it even looks like weasel wording for exactly what they said from their point of view.
I think that on topics like this, it's important to expose the premises, the concrete basic facts much more than the conclusion, the general abstraction.
First, variety is the species of life.
Second, the reason cancer wasn't "on the radar" is because we didn't know much.
If you look into the history of cancer, it has existed forever. Wikipedia claims Hippocrate himself wrote about it! [1]
And as late as the 19th century, survival rate was around 10%.[2]
Your concerns have very little, if anything, to do with cancer. Monsanto didn't even exist in the 19th century.
Matches what I found here: http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/capitalcost/xls/table1.xls (5.530$/kW) (page with full report here: http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/capitalcost/, release date 2013)
Thing is that it is literally more expensive than photovoltaic at around 4k$/kW (same source). Even the Operation and Maintenance is 5 times as expensive (~93$ vs ~26$).
I must say that I did not expect the evidence to be in my favour here (as evidenced by my initial comment).
> Elon chose that particular spot because the economic of solar is geography dependent.
Yes, the Sun hits more at lower latitude: http://energy.gov/maps/solar-energy-potential
> The infrastructure costs of distributing 100% solar will be astronomical.
> I think you could pat yourself on the back if you figured out how to make it work for only 20x the cost of just the panels.
What's nice about solar is that it can be very localized (with the efficiency loss described above).
I agree that the costs of distributing all the power required for the whole of the US from the Panhandle would require… interesting, distribution architecture.
Going by the solar potential map, I guesstimate the Panhandle average to be about 525 Wh/ft^2/day and the worst parts of Washington and Oregon to be at about 350 Wh/ft^2/day. So let's assume the national average to be 440 and so assume that we need about 120% the panels needed before. Actually, let's bump that up to 140% just because my number is rather rough and the population of the US is mostly on the coasts.
Now, what do you expect the other costs to be? Probably batteries. Going by somewhat sketchy graph on the Internet, I'll approximate the energy use as constant throughout the day, with a 2X peak offset just after the sun sets. So let's assume that one third of the energy needed through the day doesn't need to be stored at all, it's used as it's generated.
Going by: http://www.eia.gov/beta/MER/index.cfm?tbl=T02.01#/?f=A&start... the US used about 100000 trillion BTU => 100E31E12 BTU 0.293071 Wh/BTU = 29 quadrillion Wh AKA 30 trillion kWh (10 times your figure for some reason).
So 30E12 kWh * 2/3 * 1/365 = 53E9 kWh of storage needed
Now, Tesla sells the Powerpack for about 2.6 M$/4MWh. 53E9 kWh * 2.6 M$/4E3 kWh = 34.5E12 $ AKA 34 trillion $.
I don't know what the economies of scale would look like on producing 530 million powerpacks, but I'm pretty sure it would make the cost substantially lower (besides, those numbers are not for bulk orders).
As for panels, going by your numbers, I get 10$/ft^2 = 10$ * (3.3 ft/m)^2 = 109 $/m^2. Assuming 15% efficient panels and assuming 420 Wh/ft^2/day * 0.15 = 686 Wh/m^2/day. So 109 $/m^2 / .686 kWh/m^2 = 159 $/kWh
30E12 kWh * 159 $/kWh = 4.77E15 AKA 4.77 quadrillion $.
30E12 kWh / 36524 h 4000$/kW = 13 trillion $, so something is off.
Indeed, your 10$/ft^2 is way off, it is for small residential installations: http://solar-power-now.com/solar-panel-cost-per-square-foot/
Now, I don't know what to think of the ~350-fold price reduction for really large installation, but it seems sensible going by electronics bulk pricing.
Assuming a more conservative 10-fold reduction for the price of batteries, we'd get 13+3.4 trillion $ = 16.4 trillion $.
Going by the EIA report, nuclear would be about 5/4 the cost/kW of solar (presumably without storage), which is about on par with the price of storage + solar: (13+3.4)/13 ≈ 5/4
> The U.S. used 3.9 trillion kWh last year, twenty percent of which is already nuclear. So that's $1.9 trillion of capital for 100% of U.S. electricity to come from nuclear.
Yes, but they may be at the end of their life: http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=228&t=21
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At any rate, I don't have much of an issue with nuclear, at least the newer breeder designs since breeders produce very little waste and the new designs are presumably very safe. But obviously, all costs being equal (assuming no error in my calculations) I'm 100% in favour of renewables over nuclear. Renewables don't have the international concerns linked with exporting nuclear reactor technology for one and that's a serious drawback of nuclear honestly.
Besides, it is somewhat meaningless to look at the price of solar panels without a reference. As I stated above, I have no idea how to estimate the cost of nuclear. I also don't know if the new kind of reactor (like traveling wave reactors) are anything more than a concept (it seems like breeder reactors are pretty much at the level of prototypes today).
I think the important point is what the price difference is rather than whether a one-time purchase of solar panels would cost an amount to large to fit in one's wallet.
Musk gave the example, when unveiling the Powerwall, that to power the whole of the US would only require the whole Texas Panhandle to be covered in panels 25% efficient.
I remember doing the calculation even with the current 15% efficiency and it came out that if each person has something like 9 m^2 of solar panels on their roof, the whole energy demand of the US is covered.
Obviously, that's a shit ton of panels and batteries and we can't just pack them all on the Panhandle for example and it's entirely possible that nuclear is much cheaper (I don't know where to get the numbers to run this calculation).
But it is possible. I think a better criticism is that it's too risky and too slow an avenue in comparison to the risk of climate change
My guess is that it's just impossible to regulate. Take a website that has state of the art threading, karma system and all that: reddit.
AskReddit threads sometimes get to 10k comments, it's just impossible to read through (the bottom 5k comments will never get read, much less upvoted). And people on Reddit sometimes say that their inbox "blew up" and what not when they get a 100 responses (which is a lot really).
Can you imagine youtube-level traffic? Imagine a video with 1M views (which is really not a crazy number by youtube standards): if 1% of users dislike your comment enough to reply to it, you'll get 10k responses! Even if we cut this number by 10 (assuming that 9/10 users either don't bother reading or replying to your comment), you'd still get 1k comments. Even a tenth of that feels like a large amount.
Now, also imagine people being able to read through your comment history and go on witch-hunts like people on Reddit sometimes do (and which every moderator tries to prevent), but on youtube audience scales. Oh god…