thworp

I think McNamara is the poster child for what damage unconstrained technocracy can do. This project is one of the less horrible ones he spearheaded, but it too had results that were completely predictable to anyone on the ground (who actually had to check their notions against reality).

Those tests do not mean anything once you clear a lower bound somewhere between 70 and 90. N N Taleb summed it up best as "IQ is a measure of unintelligence.

I think using terms and concepts from classical Information Science when talking about brains is a non-starter. To speak HN lingo, it's like measuring a computer's performance while it is in the middle of compiling the Linux kernel and training a GPT model.

Sure, the throughput for these discrete tasks was low, but the brain is not discrete. It is a heavily optimized complex system that can be taught to predict complex vector interactions in an instant and be correct enough every time. It can spot tiny movements in a sea of leaves while searching for a green herb in a green forest and immediately switch to group preservation mode when it becomes clear the movement is a tiger.

> devise a way of measuring bandwidth-in to consciousness vs bandwidth-out.

This is a dead end, "consciousness" is just a tiny goal-setting and evaluation layer on top of a a gigantic stack of "unconscious" processes. That stack is so powerful that we even use its mysterious, chaotic power to outsource formerly conscious processes after enough repetition.

This is a truism. Of course we could create social organizations that are totally unconstrained, but they will fail catastrophically. We are (and will always be) constrained and as soon as we prefer one goal to another we want to bring that hierarchy to reality. To do that we necessarily need to adjust the rewards for working towards that goal, thereby creating a social hierarchy.

> Markets dominate the world, they are not a hierarchy.

Correct. But markets are downstream from hierarchy. The hierarchy determines the access to its rewards, those rewards can then be used to participate in the market, either by directly spending them or by influencing other to do so.

> Social networks

Social networks are most certainly a hierarchy. They distribute rewards proportional to a user's success and prominently show the metrics underlying that success. They are a kind of turbo-hierarchy where your position is always obvious to everyone and changes instantly. If everyone unsubscribes from your YouTube channel everyone will know, but if nobody reads your book you can still derive status from your 1982 bestselling book.

On a more general note, a hierarchy is just a mechanism for aligning an agent's actions towards group goals via the distribution of rewards. I don't know how or why there are so many people that associate it only with the Caste system or hereditary aristocracies. Funnily enough, the hereditary aristocracies were quite adept at changing their hierarchies in response to external events.

What is a hierarchy? Broadly it's a ranking based on some criterion. As such hierarchies follow from a society's wants and needs (you could say it follows from the needs hierarchy of society itself) and shift all the time. As an example consider the rise of software developers which was based on the increasing need of society for software.

A hierarchy is necessary to allows society to adjust rewards to its needs. It isn't necessarily some oppressive force keeping people caged in their circumstances (though a dysfunctional one quickly becomes that, see the CCP aristocracy in China).

If we want more renewable energy installed, we necessarily have to adjust the hierarchy by increasing the rewards (status, money ...) for the entities and people installing it.

I don't quite get how you can reduce it to "someone is above someone". While that is obviously an aspect, you cannot have a society that does anything without having a hierarchy. If you can show me a society with no hierarchies I'm all ears.

This is a claim so extraordinary you should at least have linked some obscure paper from a *-Studies department.

Every human has their own hierarchies. Hierarchies of need, of goals and of peers (this is basically each individual's social hierarchy). But when these people form large groups they are somehow able to blank the slate and not make it hierarchical?

All mammals that form groups instinctively form hierarchies and constantly validate their own and other's position in it (any dog owner will know first-hand). Arguably the first multi-celled organism formed a hierarchy and pretty much every animal with a few Neurons has Serotonin receptors, which can be described as a pathway to continuously re-order its hierarchy of needs.

The only way in which anything social isn't hierarchical is if you look at a tiny tiny cross-section. Otherwise any "egalitarian" and "flat" organization just swapped one way to determine a hierarchy for another. As a case in point, the Liberal model of the 19th century was a project to replace an aristocratic hierarchy (based on attributes that were no longer a good fit) with a competence hierarchy. This was often called egalitarian, but practically it was just a more adapted way of forming a hierarchy.

We are so adapted to hierarchies that 6-month olds understand physical dominance and 3-year olds easily form more complex hierarchies based on social support, resources etc.

edit: Ironically calling other people "rock-dumb" is a way to signal ones own place in the hierarchy.

There are good reasons why someone might temporarily be breaking the speed limit, that are even accepted legal defences in some countries (if you have enough proof).

Biggest one is just merging / changing lanes. Often you have to go 10 or 20 over the limit to merge without impeding a lane of traffic. I sometimes see people stopping(!) at the end of a merging lane when there was a perfectly good gap they could have gotten by just speeding up. Trying to merge from a dead stop onto an 80kph+ road is more dangerous than going 90 fore sure.

Another one is on 2-lane roads. You catch up to a truck/lorry and see a gap. The gap is big enough to get the overtake done, but you instinctively go faster to make the whole thing less of a close call. Is society really helped if every truck has a 20-car queue behind it because people are afraid they'll get fined if they help traffic flow?

On a more general note, I agree that there needs to better enforcement. However, better enforcement to me includes removing all the sneaky money-making schemes you see in the wild. They put a speed limit sign on the wrong side of the road, behind bushes or behind street-side parking (often making the limit non-enforceable legally), put up a speed camera and cash in on people that won't defend themselves.

That shit has to stop, put those ressources on deadly country roads, in front of schools and other accident hotspots instead. While we're at it, do more preventative traffic stops. It's not right that blind grandma or psychotic grandson have to seriously hurt someone before anything happens.

Little anecdote here: I passed my driving exam despite going 30kph over the limit while overtaking a tractor. I just told the examiner that I was trained to leave the opposite lane asap, slowed down as soon as I noticed how fast I was going and there was no issue.

There isn't a totally wild area larger than a few square kilometres anywhere west of Warsaw in Europe.

I would like to add a point that is rarely spelled out:

A shock-therapy style stop to fossil fuel extraction will kill millions of people through starvation, economic collapse and insufficient heating in winter. Depending how shocking the shock therapy is it could be billions.

If you had ever lived and worked in the countries that are the public boogeymen for world domination, or even just with people and companies from those countries, you wouldn't be quite so down.

I think it's quite telling that the "workshop of the world" does not export high precision CNC equipment made by domestic companies in any meaningful amounts. Similarly, even before any export controls and sanctions really kicked in, their domestic chip makers had huge problems with yield and quality even though they bought tried and tested machines (and sometimes whole departments) from established chipmakers.

If you were just talking about plastic packaging you have a point. By weight that is a small percentage of plastics though, which is incidentally why it is so cheap.

For other applications plastics are an outright miracle material though. Imagine if all drinks came in glass bottles; all cases and other structural parts were made of metal or wood; all elastic members were made of rubber or treated wood. The added need for shipping alone would probably outweigh the CO2 impact from current plastics production. As it is you get plastics almost for free while refining oil. Not to mention the insane demand there would be for metals, wood and rubber.

Mostly to prevent dust and other dirt accumulating before evrything goes into the final packaging.

Sorry if my reply was a bit snarky.

I think we have a fundamental philosophical disagreement here. You think that human systems should follow human ideals first and only deviate when absolutely necessary. I think human systems should follow natural systems and only deviate when absolutely necessary. I think this keeps us grounded and enables the bottom-up growth and evolution of our civilization.

As such I think it is entirely fair that the default is that prices for services should reflect the resources consumed for such a service. I agree there should be exceptions such as healthcare (up to a certain extent that's negotiated within each political unit) but air travel is definitely not one of them.

In my experience the issue is not about taking it seriously, I've rarely met someone totally unconcerned in real life. The real issue is what to do about it, how to do it and in what timeframe.

With these wet bulb events and the breathless death counts in the media people get the impression that heat waves are bigger killers than cold winters, when it's the opposite (and if you include indirect and long-term deaths by an order of magnitude).

There are also some serious and well connected organizations advancing plans that I can only see as attempted mass murder. If your plan projects no cargo ships by 2035 you will kill millions from the fragility of food supply chains alone.

If you want to reduce fertilizer use, fine. Better targeting and smarter application can reduce the consumption by at least 30%. But if you want to use no fertilizer you will kill billions.

Even the more grounded and non-murderous proposals have some serious question marks. Electrify almost all energy use by running 300% overproduction of renewables, to be stored in batteries and pump storage that isn't even planned yet while at the same time increasing electricity demand by 400%? Yea sure that will get done in 30 years, no problem.

The climate doomers always insist that the extinction event will be caused by climate change destroying food supply. But crops can be bred, new areas can be cultivated and ressource use reduced. The fact that 6 billion of us only exists thanks to chemical fertilizer, mechanized agriculture and amazing seed variants is not open to argument though.

> Lithium Ion should be replaces ASAP by safer chemistries so we can sidestep this issue completely

That would be nice, but so far there are no good candidates that have anywhere near the energy density of Li-based cells. As far as I understand it, besides material degradation and overcharge/overdraw, the energy density itself poses a risk. So even if we had that miracle cell chemistry it would be still pose a fire hazard when subjected to mechanical stress. The stored energy has to go somewhere.

No you wouldn't. The average human driver is vastly safer than Autopilot. I will agree that autopilot is better than the worst 10% of drivers and maybe on par with the worst 20%. That group causes most accidents and almost all severe accidents. The average human driver drives something like 200,000 miles without any accidents.

edit: Upon looking up some stats I might have misremembered, in any case the median human drivers is definitely vastly safer than Autopilot.

disclaimer: I have no first-hand experience, just second-hand.

It should be impossible to leave the factory like this. Let's say the issue is a substandard batch from a supplier that cracks from stress at some stage of the frame assembly (like when adding the battery pack, welding or adhesive bonding). The car should be inspected after all structural parts are added, at minimum visually but ideally with some kind of spectroscopy.

Also, if this is a whole batch with this issue it should have been noticed when doing QC on the shipment.

One option is that this happened at some stage during shipping (maybe the car rolled off a trailer and fell half a meter). Still, the dealership should be doing an inspection before handing the car over.

All in all, if this really isn't the result of some accident it is a total failure.

Since you appear to have some insider knowledge: Do you know how airlines deal with different passenger demographics? Does Korean air have adjustment factors for passenger weight averages? Americans 1.4, Brits 1.2, Kenyans 0.9, North Koreans 0.7?

Despite how ridiculous it sounds they must do something like this, no?

You're right. When your plane has to fly to an alternate airport due to weather and runs out fuel on the way, the last thing you want to feel is guilt over having indirectly fat-shamed your fellow passengers.

Lighting money on fire to increase valuation. Getting a cab dispatch service to get valued at insane multiples was a master stroke.

> Which is all the end product of the demolition of the organized socialist left & trade union movement in the west through the 70s and 80s and early 90s and the retreat of associated intellectuals into academia and cultural politics.

This was not some grand conspiracy, the Socialists just realized that workers in the West were generally happy and well off (iirc Marcuse said "Capitalism delivers the goods") and not at all friendly to Socialists' plans of revolution.

As a result there was a push to shift the propagandizing ("educating") to the next best oppressed groups they could find, with these being the familiar categories of LGBTQ, racial minorities (only certain ones), women etc.).

Just like the socialist revolutionaries of old, the majority of the "New Left" are not parts of those groups. They are merely using them as a "revolutionary mass" whose misery and grievances are single-use tools for the revolutionaries to gain power. Lenin was fuming at Bolshevik party members who actually tried to negotiate better working conditions or pay pre-1917 because happy workers don't have "revolutionary potential" (a euphemism for not being desperate enough to want to put him in power).

> If, as I keep hearing from right-wing commentators, "the left" is somehow dominant, it's only because "the left" has wholesale dropped its historical anti-capitalist mission, and has retreated almost exclusively into culture wars; and generally taken positions which enrage the right on that basis, but doesn't actually challenge any real power.

I explored some of the reasons for that above, but everybody with some sense could see that capitalist societies were happier, almost never genocided their own population, were vastly more prosperous and even produced enough surplus to have better social welfare than Socialist countries. On the other hand Socialism always ended badly, sometimes catastrophically. People are not blind, and associating your political movement with 60 million corpses is not a smart move.

The reason they don't challenge "real power" is because the objective is to gain the power vested in those institutions, not to challenge them.

Maybe industrialization reduced wages for some craftsmen who were forced to become factory workers. But for almost all new factory workers their wealth, working conditions and working hours were a huge step up from their previous occupations as sheep herders, unskilled agri-labourers and subsistence farmers (with side hustles in proto-industrial home work).

Pretty soon the demand (and pay) for skilled craftsmen rocketed back up because the newly affluent workers could now afford to buy more items and some of those were not yet mass-producable.

First, I meant that as a suggestion to look at comparable countries and look at what they're doing because it has been proven it will work. That is as opposed to different measure which might work but have side effects.

That leads me to the heart of your comment. Sure you could institute some kind of dystopian dictatorship that makes sure nobody dies of the causes we deem preventable now. But it would be a cure that kills the patient (free society).

So, there are always trade offs. What I was saying is that looking at other countries and what they've done you can see the trade offs in advance and decide if they're worth it.

Hah! They might be low-paid and on a salary, but they snub their noses at the "working class" and share none of their values or beliefs.

I half agree with you, but if we're only talking about death and accident prevention it would be worth it to look at other highly developed countries that have much lower accident rates (there are quite a few that have much lower numbers, both per capita and per mile).

Of course, copying these countries will take time, especially because half the problem is the terrible drivers education and lax enforcement which precludes quite a few measures.

Things that could be done right now are:

* designing roads to calm traffic (bends and such): highly effective at reducing pedestrian/cyclist accidents

* building proper separated bike paths

* mandatory inspections in all states. a non-negligible % of accidents are caused by defective vehicles

* mandating and actually enforcing minimum following distance on highways

* banning modifications like steel plate grills (basically a human-crushing ram)

* scrapping the entire tax and regulation scheme that lead to the size wars in trucks and SUVs

Then there are things like replacing more STOP signs with YIELD, roundabouts, giving bike paths green lights together with turning traffic (requires drivers to look in their blindspot and yield) and lane discipline. Those broadly reduce frustration and fatigue which helps people stay calm.

It's not just that there is a risk of re-centralization from network effects.

Since you mentioned email, there is also a large risk that filtering unwanted content and impersonators from appearing on your instance becomes so expensive and/or time-consuming that only a few instances have the resources to do it, just like happened with email.

You answered your own question, one of the ways is to "adjust for consumer preferences" the goods baskets You can also change the weights for various localities or overstate how much better the new version of a product is and reduce its weight.

Fundamentally the BLS in the US has no incentive to accurately report inflation. They are a department of the executive with no real safeguards against political influence. Reducing the official CPI reduces the government's expenditure and understating inflation is a great way to do so without officially cutting any budget item.

Further, see my sister comment to yours, inflation is personal, a country-wide single-number inflation measure is broken by design.

It is certainly gamed, but maybe not in the way you mean it. The fundamental issue is that every agent in the economy has their own price index, condensing this into a single number is impossible without losing almost all the information.

Essentially, inflation is a field like air pressure (Eric Weinstein put it this way). Even if the weights and items baskets in the various categories were chosen with the best intentions it would not match anybody's experience. It would be like saying the weather in the US tomorrow will be 1056.

On top of that there is almost certainly a lot of "adjusting" of the weights and item baskets, the organizations producing the statistics have no incentives not to.

I fully agree that these "blitzscale" business have a horrible business model that is not sound, both economically (depends on free funding) and morally (the goal is to corner the market or at least get an oligopoly and then exploit your position).

That said I don't think a win here would help the current workers. Like all minimum wage laws this will reduce demand (obviously people don't want to pay a 12$ delivery fee for an order of $20), push business towards even shadier employment practices and medium term towards automation / "self-service".

As much as I would want it not to be true, the low-skill end of the employment market will always be easily replaceable and consumers won't be willing to pay unlimited amounts for something they could easily do themselves. As such it would help people a lot more if there was an easy path towards acquiring skills, guaranteeing that these bottom-rung jobs will be only temporary.