tbrownaw

d'oh, yep

> Can someone steelman private equity, please?

Step back and look at what it fundamentally is.

Person A has a business they want to sell.

Person B has a pile of money and thinks that that business is (or can be) a good investment.

That's it.

So, what happens if person A is prohibited from selling their business? Are they forced to keep working because they don't have enough other savings to retire on? Do they shut the business down in order to retire? Something else?

.

Calls to ban private equity are attempts to play "shoot the messenger".

DISREGARD THIS, I CAN'T READ TODAY

> Contrary to popular belief, being intelligent in one thing does correlate with being intelligent at other things[1].

> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

Which section of that very long article are you claiming supports your assertion?

Here's a bit from the start of the "Concept" section:

>> In a famous research paper published in 1904,[8] English psychologist Charles Spearman observed that children's performance measures across seemingly unrelated school subjects were positively correlated. The consistent finding of universally positive correlation matrices of mental test results (or the "positive manifold"), despite large differences in tests' contents, has been described as "arguably the most replicated result in all psychology".[9]

That explicitly contradicts your assertion.

> There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world"

If I do something destructive to my copy of Accelerate -- feed it through a scanner, leave it where the munchkin can reach, whatever -- that does nothing to deprive you of your copy. Books are funny like that; there tend to be lots of identical ones.

The basic problem is that out-of-sample predictions don't work very well.

With a title like that, I was expecting a piece about society ending as a result of how too many people marrying chatbots affects the population pyramid.

> As a benign example, eating food with your hands rather than utensils. In some cultures this is rarely ever tolerated, in others it depends on the food item, and in others still you might always eat with your hands.

I know there are some strange people who eat pizza with a fork, but is there actually anyone who does that with say hamburgers?

I thought that was only the top <very few>, and most just made pocket change?

Well, the enforcement mechanism for manners.

> For billionaires shame makes no sense. They will never have to confront the people that they abuse.

This sounds like you're agreeing with the article about consequentialism / "optimization culture" being the cause.

> What you experience is a cultural difference.

In that not all cultures recognize causing negative externalities as a bad thing?

Well at least they need it until they get back a success response from the bank/payment processor/whoever.

I do not see the term "euphemism treadmill" in this anywhere. This is talking about the same thing, so I'd think the common term for it would at least be mentioned.

I'd think copper would mean ferric chloride, which isn't that bad.

> want to be coddled and always want to feel like they are the king of the world. Greeters at Walmart, cashiers not being allowed to sit but have to stand for "respect",

I thought the greeters were an anti-shoplifting technique, "hello someone saw you here" kind of thing.

And putting a seat in the checkout station means they can't be packed quite as closely and also gets in the way when someone else needs to tag in to ring up booze or whatever.

> What I’m particularly curious about is what the “endgame” of this looks like.

A higher fraction of money going into the system is lost to navigating adversarial processes. And probably the occasional person getting in legal trouble for not validating their LLM output before feeding it to a formal process.

For customer-funded things (eg home insurance), this means higher prices for the same in-practice benefits (as distinct from nominal benefits; any gap between nominal and actual benefits will probably end up smaller).

For publicly-funded things (government benefits), this could show as increased budgets for the same result or decreased results on the same budget.

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> So I suspect this will lead to a much more formally rigorous system with various “certificates” proving, e.g., that you lost your job or that a doctor has confirmed you have a disability.

Well, maybe standardization of how employers or doctors or whoever are required to report things to the government.

> what the desirable alternative is here

Limits on how much parents can spend other people's resources on their kids. Which goes with civil office being a job rather than a special privilege.

I use an xrdp quite a lot. It works fine.

Yes. They'd probably have kept the device for a while, but he wouldn't be in legal trouble.

... And motivation is what lets you stay disciplined when random life things try to get in the way.

Limits are what give consistency when your pod gets scheduled on nodes with different amounts of load.

27000 + 20% is 32400 not 47000, so not sure what's up with that sentence.

Also, define "success". Even if it's just about being exceptional in economic terms, AIUI a bog-standard swdev salary is enough to be in the top 10% with no favoritism needed. And if it's about being able to retire and have grandkids come visit sometimes, I think that might be more common than not.

Several states have already had this for a while now.

Sure, but that looks like a page footer. If I go to the site home it's the same, so it's probably the last time the site was a whole was updated.

The usual argument I see is that group differences in outcome exist, therefore there necessarily must be discrimination somewhere causing those differences. That this discrimination can't be found is proof of how inventive the people doing the discriminating are.

Since these practices are inferred from their effects rather than directly observed, there's no list.

At least some were the result of court cases, so maybe not that trivial to reverse.

> a) "just legislate that being racist/sexist to people is illegal, then have judges interpret" (which is what seems to be simply necessary to actually make progress against the endlessly inventive evil of racism/sexism),

The current rules are that [in specific listed contexts] you are not allowed to treat individuals differently on the basis of [explicit list of characteristics].

That's essentially your (a), except it's not up to interpretation. Pretending that it is up to interpretation is how you get things like what the article is about (in that case by measuring group statistics rather than comparing individual experiences).

I don't see a publish date on this? As I understand it, there have been recent shifts away from what's described and towards the relevant government agencies wanting more direct evidence of individuals being treated differently.

> open source nature is something of a technicality

No, but maybe this highlights that it's never accurate to conflate "open source" or "free (as in speech) software" with end-users having power over the people providing resources to the project.

Probably clergy?