swatow

In most cases, after factoring out a function from a bigger function, it's usually a good opportunity to think about what this function really does, and to make it do something conceptually simpler (even if that is less tailored to its sole use case). This way, you can even write meaningful tests for the new function.

Grad students tend to be intelligent capable people (from privileged backgrounds too!). Therefore we don't expect grad students to be desparate, because we infer that they ahve a lot of other options.

The only sense in which grad students are desperate, is that they really want the other advantages that being a grad student confers, most of all the education and experience, and the degree they get at the end. And this was precisely the point of the post you replied to: graduate students are getting non-monetary compensation.

If you disagree, I challenge you to find one testimonial from a grad student whose story is that they were so desperate for money, that they had no choice but to enroll in grad school to make ends meet.

This is just wrong. It is possible that publishing and grants are correlated with institution rank (and teaching excellence is usually a relative measure so hard to compare across schools anyway).

It seems decades of anti-discrimination indoctrination have resulted in a situation where no argument is to sloppy, and no evidence is to flimsy, when you are arguing that discrimination exists somewhere.

The paper (and most game theory based papers) also assumes that people are perfectly rational and have perfect knowledge. The only difference is that instead of actions being restricted to the free market, and payoffs being consumption, game theory allows an arbitrary environment (chosen by the paper author) to provide the actions and payoffs.

What actually gets published tends to be filtered by its political content. In particular, results with a liberal bias tend to be promoted.

[1] In classical economics, the reverse holds. It's very hard to show that any mechanism is possible under the assumptions of classical economics. Hence the huge number of negative results: (a) Coase theorem, (b) the Modigliani-Miller Theorem (irrelevance of capital structure) and (c) Ricardian equivalence. All these results basically say that if you try to do X (where X is (a) change people's actions that have externalities by assigning property rights, (b) change the value of a firm by changing its capital structure, and (c) change people's actions by government spending), the free market will completely undo your actions and leave the situation unchanged.

Unfortunately it's not so simple. You start out as a Chemistry teacher who just wants to make money on the side giving people a quality product, and end up committing multiple murders.

EDIT: I just read what you actually wrote. only killing people as needed??? You're nuts.

Do you think the ant-racist movement is morally equivalent to GamerGate because they have "done absolutely nothing to stop it"?

For example suppose I were to criticize Zoe Quinn or Anita Sarkeesian. And suppose other people read my criticism, and decided to make nuisance phone calls, or even more severe forms of harassments. Was my original criticism harassment? Because that is how the GamerGate movement has been characterized. Since some people allegedly engaged in things that were clearly defined as harassment or abuse, it was considered that the entire "movement", i.e. everyone making the criticism, was engaging in harassment.

Let's turn this around, and consider whether it is "abuse" when people criticize right wingers.

The situation is especially problematic because the law also contains ambiguous crime such as harassment.

Supporting old platforms is not just cross compilation, or at least the cross compilation involved is highly non-trivial.

I would say that excessive cynicism is as bad a bias as naivety. Everything you describe is actually consistent with perfectly informed consumers and profit maximizing companies. You are just not looking for explanations along these lines.

Not if the information is vague or subjective or manipulable (as I think "expected lifespan" would be), or if that information is very costly for the manufacturer to estimate, or for the government to verify.

Sometimes its better to let the market work on its own, e.g. through product reviews.

I think this law is probably heavy handed and unnecessary. Especially in an age where most people spend their money on items like phones and laptops, which are reparable and become obsolete very fast anyway.

I would simply ask technical questions and judge for yourself. Some whiteboard coding can't hurt.

Sure, they should be thinking about the implications and ethics of their actions, as we all should, and yet they also signed up to serve the nation, and to do what their nation thought necessary and just. Do people think that democratic nations should not have armies, and it is an ethical imperative for Americans, English and others to refuse to serve? If not, then it is all of our responsibilities, as voters and citizens, to ensure that only just wars are fought, and using ethical means. If not, then we are all responsible, not just the soldiers.

Instead of asking "how could you kill someone" we should be asking "how can you live in a political system that causes people to be ordered to kill people, in which you have the ability to change this fact".

I'm not a pacifist myself, I just don't see how in a democracy, the buck stops with the soldiers.

In this case, I think one version of "privilege" is the idea that our society involves unipolar power relations where one group/ideology is privileged and enjoys special advantages. Individual people might in some ways align with this group/ideologies, and in other ways not (this is called "intersectionality"). But when they do align with this group/ideology they receive some of its benefits.

Sago's version is that privilege is just another word for any group having any advantage for any reason. I.e. "privilege" stripped of its underlying assumptions about societies power structure. It's unfortunate that Sago feel so strongly that they represent sociological research, when I think that almost all sociologists use the other definition.

Sago says that Asians might be privileged simply because their culture [0]. The orthodox view would be that Asians only receive White privilege, by their willingness to accept both the White lifestyle, working under a capitalist system, and adopt White views on Black/White race relations. To the extend that Asians also study harder, that would be an accident of history, and probably something an orthodox sociologist would try to downplay (e.g. by looking at Nth generation Asians).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9126189

I honestly feel like a pro-vaccination advocate when I post about economics.

EDIT: And to address your (very weak) point, how does working in factories not make people in poor countries richer? Are you aware of what a Chinese farmer makes per year, compared with a Chinese factory worker?

2) How many high social status, well varied jobs can you name where most of the winners are women?

Law is both high status and favors people who are attractive and have good social skills. According to [1], women are 34% of the law industry compared with 12.33% of software engineers [2].

3) You defeat your point in your own parentheses.

Not really, because there is still a gender gap in math and physics, and so this just means (3) does not explain all of the gender gap in CS.

EDIT: I'm not going to reply to any comment that isn't a reply to this. You don't have to agree with the way that the delay before you can respond to a post grows exponentially as thread depth increases, but threads are unreadable if you try to circumvent it.

[1] http://www.americanbar.org/groups/women/resources/statistics...

[2] http://qz.com/143967/the-tech-industrys-woman-problem-statis...

That is actually the least intellectual way you could approach the issue. You are relying on people self-censoring (and we may see some downvotes to provide some real censorship). But I will give you the uncensored answer. There are, in fact, a number of possible reasons apart from the one you have in mind. Here are some.

1) Tech is meritocratic so it attracts men who are less physically attractive or socially capable, because they mainly need technical skill. This in turn makes the field less attractive to women.

2) Tech is a monotonous job with low social status, and so it attracts people driven by ambition and desire for money, who tend to be male.

3) Women are fundamentally less interested in technology because they prefer fields with human interest (though this doesn't explain the gap between programming and, for example, math or physics).

I have only really addressed the gender issue above, but I think that's enough to critique your original way of phrasing the problem.

Maybe the MBAs jump on the bandwagon, but I think they mostly do it to pick the winning side, not because they fear the latent power of nerds.

That said, I think you've very accurately described the various attacks on traditional nerd/Silicon Valley culture that are occurring.

In the context of diversity in tech, nerds are a subculture dominated by White males. This culture has a misogynistic dark side, and it is important to show that you don't have to conform to this subculture to succeed in tech.

However, in the context of the corporatization of tech, suddenly the nerds are the good guys. And funnily enough, nerd culture was actually part of the counterculture movement. The old guard of cyber-hippies need to stop the slide into corporate monotony.

The ideology I support is free market economics with generous redistribution and government services. This has been put into practice in Australia, NZ, Canada, the UK and Scandinavia. The only serious deviation is in the concessions made to the labour union movement, but these have been lessening with time.

Actually it is possible (and probably) that H-1B holders earn the same wages as their equivalents. The presence of the H-1B workers increases the supply of labor, and lowers wages for everyone. But it happens simultaneously so that at no time are the H-1B holders earning less.

It's interesting to me that in order to deal with this inconsistency, people have basically invented the myth that it's hard to shift jobs while on an H-1B, and thus H-1B holders are like "indentured servants". The reality is for most H-1B holders the job market is no different, as long as they have the visa, which depends on the government, not their company.

The left ignore the benefits of the free market, and pretend that there is a better system out there. They selfishly expect workers the developing world to respect the "right" of the Western middle class to high wages, as if magically other opportunities that don't involve competing with the Western middle class will arise.

The right want people to think that capitalism is magic, because they don't even want redistribution, which mainstream economists believe is something the market cannot do itself, and must be done by the government. The right want people to believe that all government intervention in the economy is equally bad, whether it is fixing the price of rent, providing medical services, or a negative income tax.

That said, I don't think H-1Bs are best used on average paid contractors. I know people earning a lot more money who missed out on the lottery. These people could have contributed a lot more to the economy.

EDIT: Added scare quotes around "right" in response to a comment.