strgcmc

"Gifted programs" are not objectively perfect tests of gifted-ness. They select for some fairly specific mix of traits/skills that a school district has chosen to call "gifted"; then, if you don't pass this arbitrary test, well then you are considered "not gifted."

But this is wrong wrong wrong, so wrong that it's almost a trivial logical fallacy: just because most dogs have 4 legs, doesn't mean that all 4-legged animals are dogs, nor that a dog with 3 legs stops being a dog. Testing for "dog-ness" by counting 4 legs, is wrong. Likewise, just because a school district designs an arbitrary test of "gifted-ness", doesn't mean that all children who pass it are gifted, nor that children who don't pass it have no gifts. These tests cannot possibly capture the full range of human gifts.

You are arguing a strawman that the person you replied to never stated. Yes exceptional people exist, this was never under debate and that poster did not claim otherwise. But "gifted" programs do not perfectly identify all exceptional people across all dimensions of exceptionality with universal perfect accuracy. Replacing "gifted" programs with accelerated learning programs could achieve the same goal of offering advanced learning for SOME exceptional students, without going through the fundamentally flawed and oversimplified binary sorting process that inaccurately labels all students as either "gifted" or "not gifted".

You're completely overlooking the fact that, a rapid demographic shift such as say, doubling life expectancy within 50 years, would lead to massive social upheaval, regardless of voting preferences.

There would be huge shortages of nursing homes, care workers, early bird dinner spots, seniors cruises, etc. (sorry, had to throw some jokes in there). Social security benefits would collapse. Retirement age would absolutely have to change, or we'd simply have massive unemployment (imagine if people lived to 120 but couldn't find work for the last 50-60 years of their life).

Thinking about voting preferences is really just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Society would either collapse or see massive shifts simply due to physical needs, well before voting preferences became the dominant factor.

I'm surprised you would say this, because creating internal "free markets" to encourage competition across teams is not an uncommon pattern within Amazon. I could name numerous examples of multiple teams competing either implicitly or explicitly with each other, seeing who's designs or systems would win, seeing which teams would be more successful at attracting talent.

I do agree about this being mostly a punting of the responsibility for deciding from L10 to L8. But I think competition is not a bug, it's a feature.

Are you so sure about that? Think about the CEOs themselves as the lemons... a lack of transparency can lead to the same adverse selection pressure that trends towards "lemon CEOs" flourishing, and pay transparency can help align the incentives somewhat.

The trouble is, this "je ne sais quoi" that you speak of, that you "could tell he had the chops to figure things out", is unquantifiable and almost totally subjective. To be a bit blunt and cynical, this way of evaluating candidates basically boils down to, "do I like this candidate?" Your criteria for liking someone happens to be that you look for these nebulous "chops for figuring things out". What about the other interviewers at your company? What kind of stuff would they like? Would they evaluate "chops" the same way you do?

Or, just imagine that you're interviewing a hypothetically equivalent candidate who also had the same drive and "chops to figure things out", but who happened to be less fluent in conversational English. Are you so sure that you'd be able to pick up on the same underlying "signal" about their chops, if it was obscured by some language fluency noise?

Hiring is a Hard Problem, and there's a big gap between well-intentioned intuition and translating that into robust processes.

In a funny twist of fate, I for one have become less and less worried about the "opposite" scenario coming to pass, as time goes on and we observe the evolution of political discourse at least in America (and to a lesser extent globally perhaps).

What I mean is, the general trend towards anti-intellectualism in the right-wing, means that their policy positions generally trend towards being based on opinions rather than facts, and become further and further divorced from reality. For example, think about banning contraception or sex education, which are proven to reduce teen pregnancy and abortions; these are counterproductive policy positions the right wing takes, because they don't care to judge policies by their factual outcomes, but instead by what "feels right".

Ergo, as time passes, I find it less and less likely that corporations or organizations that have to live in the real world, deal with practical real world facts and outcomes, will end up taking right wing policy positions or censoring pro-reality positions. It would be fundamentally anti-profit and anti-capitalist to do so and goes against their self-interest (which is an incentive structure that political parties don't share, as spewing misinformation and even acting irrationally won't necessarily lose them voters or supporters, but companies who act irrationally will over time tend to be less profitable), which is cynically the best available guarantee of good decision-making that we have in our broken society.

TLDR: I am not worried about a world where "round Earther's" or pro-vaxx positions get censored, because corporations know that round Earth and pro-vaxx policies lead to better outcomes, being better grounded in reality.

Imagine this attitude applied to climate change. Letting the stupid runs its course and choosing inaction, will lead to disastrous warming outcomes.

So, maybe there are situations where doing nothing is okay, but I don't think very large scale problems that require coordinated large scale action over long time scales to address, like global pandemics or mitigating the impacts of man made climate change, are the right situations for that kind of approach. Too many thousands/millions will die, too many billions/trillions of dollars of damage will be done, via inaction.

Of course, it all comes down to whether you can stomach the cost of inaction, because maybe you don't think the impacts are all that bad. I don't have an answer to that, if two parties fundamentally disagree about what the cost of impact will be or whether that cost is acceptable (e.g. many folks in the US apparently think 600k+ COVID deaths in the US isn't a big deal, and wasn't worth the interventions applied to mitigate it to that level).

You say this like it's some kind of benefit to the girl in question... IMO seems far more likely to lead to increased harassment and negative outcomes, rather than being a positive.

This will sound naive, but going back to first principles, the real root problem seems to be the lack of a true digital "ownership" option. If libraries had an option to choose between digital ownership, vs digital subscriptions, at least they'd retain some foundational level of control over digital media that they bought and own.

I feel that as an tech/media industry, we either lost our way or just intentionally chose this path, where we have generally wrongly equated ownership with DRM. But a basic definition of ownership includes the "legal right to use, possess, and give away a thing"[1]... being able to give away a digital object (i.e. via copying), is in no way incompatible with ownership. It's just that today's class of rights holders prefer to rent-seek via licensing, but that is not an insurmountable problem (i.e. it's hard to imagine that in a post-scarcity Star Trek future, they'd still be dealing with software/media licensing in the same way that we do today).

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/ownership

Because humans are the constraint, not the bits. Humans (in a group, societal sense) need to context switch over time, and cannot perfectly retain equal, active understanding of how to use all systems or frameworks ever invented, no matter how perfectly the bits are preserved.

That being said, in an archival sense, it would be a shame and seems unnecessary to lose anything, since perfect preservation is achievable. But archival preservation, is different from staying in active use with a healthy community of practitioners perpetually ad infinitum.

I feel like we should separate professionalism (i.e. the spectrum of familiarity to over-familiarity) from empathy.

To me, how I want to see empathy applied in a military context, is nothing to do with familiarity or chumminess, and everything to do with the idea that, if you are my commander and you order me to battle, to fight and to die, that you do so carrying the full weight of that responsibility, that you understand my life and my worth as a human being, and that you empathize with the gravity and danger of what you are asking me to undertake, and that you won't spend my life in vain.

That is the real root of empathy, in the military, for leaders to really truly understand the both mundane and yet impossible weight of what they are asking their soliders to do. If you cannot empathize with the human condition at that level, then you should not be fit for military leadership (naive of me, I know).

I'm not the person you're responding to, but I would say unequivocally and unironically, yes! The end result is more competition, lower prices, and more options for the end consumer. Sure the raw idea of this mechanism is a little naive and could be refined, but the outcomes you paint sound totally reasonable to me... think of this as a creative way to apply a new kind of tax to the criminally undertaxed big tech behemoths like Amazon and Google.

> Productivity has stalled mostly because people have already filled their needs, so it makes little sense to buy more. Basically everyone have the clothes they need, the food they need, the car they need, the computer they need, already. Screen entertainment and information is basically free nowadays. So no matter how much you increase productivity these sectors will remain mostly constant.

I know you are not being literal with your claims, but I just wanted to provide some data, so that others who read it will have some grounded context. Across several categories, there is a stubborn (and maybe surprisingly or not-so-surprisingly consistent) 10-15% of Americans who don't have many of those needs filled that you mentioned:

- The official national poverty rate hovers around 10%, but there has always been much controversy about defining what that means and what the threshold should be: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...

- 32 million uninsured under 65 (the default age threshold for Medicare): https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/health-insurance.htm

- 42+ million Americans face food insecurity: https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america

- It should come as no surprise that many poor people cannot afford cars and hence rely on public transit more, but that public transit systems are woefully underfunded (or funded but misappropriated/delayed/etc.) in America. Because economic disparity is interwoven with racial inequality, this is not just an economic problem; suffice it to say that, no, not everyone in America has the car they need: https://www.urban.org/features/unequal-commute

- The FCC reports large gains in the past 5 years for broadband and mobile broadband access, but this is baselined against a paltry and outdated 25/3 and 10/3 Mbps standard definition for "broadband speed" (trying living in a 25/3 Mbps household while remote-working, video conferencing, streaming Netflix, etc.): https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-21-18A1.pdf

This is like saying, why have Uber use algorithms to match rider and driver, if you still need human customer support to deal with exceptions?

IMO, the answer is fundamentally that it expands the market (no more limitations like medallions, scales better than hiring dispatchers, etc.), and creates more demand overall (more people use these cars than would've used traditional taxis).

Of course, even the customer support gets automated away, until humans only need to deal with exceptions to the exceptions (that automated support was supposed to handle). So there can still be economies of scale and efficiency.

You don't think holodecks will come with freemiun subscription plans or micro-transactions, a la video game skins and upgrades today?

Why would someone sell you a holodeck once, when they could sell you plugins and content modules for your holodeck continuously forever? You don't think you'd get bored looking at the same trial plan holo-beach for years?

Of course, piracy and/or open source will hopefully be around to offer free alternatives.

Not the person you're replying to, but I wanted to offer a perspective that might bridge what you see as a gap in philosophies.

The "future you", the one that is healthier (i.e. literally from a medical perspective, not just perception), can only exist if you make choices today that enable progress towards that future state. In other words, the current you, the unhealthy you, already contains the seed of what is necessary to become the future you. Perhaps all you need is a conducive environment, so you can blossom; a seed requires water and fertile soil, but the seed is the one doing the work. You might need to find some water (most metaphorically, but sometimes literally: lots of people are just dehydrated and it contributes to low energy or lethargy), or a different soil to plant yourself in (different city, different job, different friends, etc.), but it is you who does the work to allow yourself to germinate, to bloom.

The point of thinking like this, is to avoid disassociating the future you, to avoid thinking of that person as somehow different from or "other-than" your current you. People already get discouraged enough by looking at the glossy and fake Instagram influencers around them; what a tragedy it would be to let your present self get discouraged by your future self!

You are already that person. You are already worthy.

If carbon taxes go up, miners will be incentivized to pursue low/no-carbon alternative energy sources, thereby accelerating the shift to cleaner energy. Mining can either be viewed as creating a profit incentive where none existed before, or at least enhancing the profit incentive even further. Clean energy needs more profit incentives to really scale adoption.

I am all for carbon taxes, to shape the market towards cleaner energy. And I do think it will successfully push miners even faster towards adoption of other energy sources.

Returnships are another common term, as a spin on internships. Many big name tech companies have an active program, including Apple, Amazon, etc.

Maybe you're not dense, maybe you're just such a genius that pigeonhole principle proofs seem naturally obvious and tautologically true to you? :-)

I found this enlightening (particularly "Sketch of a Proof"), though I also admit that it seemed fairly straightforward, with elegance borne of simplicity rather than of brilliance or cleverness: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theorem_on_friends_and_stran...

Doesn't this happen all the time? Many psychology studies are done by bringing in test subjects, asking for their consent to be interviewed or tested under the guise of studying X, when in fact the researchers are looking to evaluate Y instead?

E.g. I the researcher ask if you consent to spending 30min completing a series of tasks to sort objects by their shape, presumably because I want to study your ability to recognize shapes. However, what I am actually studying is the group dynamics, of how well you and others in the group cooperate or have conflict over your tasks.

On the point about IPOs, this would seem to back up the idea that, a boom in IPOs has correlated with recessions and crashes soon after, in the past ~20 years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/270290/number-of-ipos-in...

A drop in IPOs seems like a lagging indicator (they will drop off after the economy has cooled off), but it's not clear to me if a boom in IPOs is a leading indicator or not.

Not that I disagree with what you said, but maybe you can think about it this way (again, contrived oversimplification):

- Google are the experts/masters of knowing "what you want", expressed via your search intents

- Facebook are the experts/masters of knowing "who you are" (including demographics, as well as family/friends/connections, interests/hobbies/personality, etc.)

Google can guess at the same type of "who" information that Facebook owns (e.g. gender inference), and vice versa Facebook can guess at the type of info that Google owns (e.g. search/purchase intent), but both have distinct relative advantages over the other, which is why there is still competition in this space (the GP comment was questioning, why hasn't Google just "won", why is FB even in the picture, etc.).

Because you can sell them something other than the one thing they are looking for.

Contrived example: I search for "buying new SUV" so clearly you should show me new car ads and car buying articles and reviews. But if I am a mid-30s married person, you might also try to sell me car seats for the babies I demographically am likely to have or want to have soon. OTOH, if am an older 60s retired widow, you may want to advertise warranty and car maintenance plans for my peace of mind about taking care of the car.

Actually it's a little more nuanced than that, because I could be mid-30s and married but choosing to be childfree, or I could be a 65 year old widow and former car mechanic who is more than capable of taking care of my own vehicle. So collecting the demographic data is about building a gradient of probabilities, things that are ranked in likelihood of value/relevance, and using that information to inform the demand side of advertisers deciding how much to bid for my eyeballs.

Seriously! For all the folks crying foul about how unions are awful and won't work and folks will get automated out of a job, I feel like they simply have zero clue about unions in Europe.

Is Amazon pulling out of the European market? Are the unions so onerous that it's unprofitable to do business there? Have there been massive waves of layoffs and replacing union workers in Europe with robots?

Yes, automation is coming, and yes society as a whole has to reckon with what it means to have an automated society with a drastically different labor market. But the fact that Amazon is energetically growing and pursuing business in Europe, proves what a strawman this whole idea is, that unions are somehow inherently ridiculous or could never possibly work.

Guess what, they're working, in production today, and have been for decades. The fact that entrenched powers don't want it to work in the US, doesn't mean it can't work.

By this argument, you'd think we'd still be using CDs and Walkmans, instead of moving to mp3s and iPods/iPhones.

Gold will have its place as an analog store of value. But you are simply missing the point about how to evaluate a digital store of value. Think about which digital properties a digital store of value would need to have, since concepts like density and chemical stability are literally useless to evaluate a digital entity against; once you have a list of digital characteristics that define what a digital store of value would need to have, you can start to check your checklist against the properties of Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrency if you want)... I'm not saying you'll automatically be convinced, but you should at least use the right checklist to compare.

What's wrong with www.ExpertSexChange.com? People deserve to hire experts for that don't they? /s

Somewhere out there must be an RFC that discusses the original thought process behind designing for case sensitive vs case insensitive domain names, or why domains should be case insensitive while URL paths should be case sensitive... Ironically this SO post seems to be a decent starting point for my curiosity: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7996919/should-url-be-ca...

Because you can measure by harm caused, not just by thoughts thought.

For example, I posit (without proof) that, because we have effectively banned hateful racist speech in most standard professional workplaces, the people who work in those environments and used to suffer harm (through being forced to work in an openly hostile environment to them, through being denied advancement or equitable compensation, through the mental stress of being the target of hate speech, etc.), that those people suffer less harm today then they used to.

- Is it perfect now? No.

- Can people still be secretly denied promotions because of racism? Absolutely.

- Does it happen less frequently in the aggregate than it used to 40-50 years ago? Almost certainly, though I base this claim on common sense for now (don't have scientific sources handy but I'm sure I can find some).

You are talking about squeezing one side of a balloon without noticing that the other end is getting bigger.

The KKK is effectively a non-entity today in modern society, sure. That's partly because "they" became Proud Boys, Patriot Front, etc. etc. As with the broader societal trends of transitioning away from traditional pre-digital power structures and groups, a rich ecosystem of new white nationalist groups have sprung up in the digital age to feed off the same hate that the KKK used to organize around.

This is probably the only way that anything gets done though. Someone has to keep the legacy system running, warts and all, while someone else has the free space to work on something better. The only thing that's misguided is comparing the two as if they were tasked with the same goal (they were not).

But, one can speculate that if the situation was reversed, and the interns and newbies were forced to maintain the old system and the old hands were given carte blanche to write a new system, that maybe they wouldn't have been as creative or open-minded about it. Or maybe they'd have deeper insights based on their experience? Who knows?

The 737 Max fiasco to me is a sign that yes, this is how engineering should work.

For example, a well engineered plane allows the pilots to control the fuel flow to engines, but also does not allow pilots to dump fuel into the passenger compartment. Much engineering goes into, how to isolate the toxic chemicals of fuel or other fluids/gases away from the passenger compartment. So you have freedom, but you also have constraints.

Likewise, a well engineered plane probably should allow pilots to fly the plane according to their needs, rather than overriding their inputs as they fight to point the nose up while the plane decides that no you really want the nose down right now. Of course the pilots should've disengaged MCAS, but in a crisis it's bad engineering to force operators to remember which unhelpful/murderous system needs to be disabled in order to avoid catastrophe. The system took too much agency away from the operators, and violated the principle as espoused by that comment you're quoting.