The general concept of luxury beliefs is very interesting, but it feels the author gives it an ideological spin:
1. The author claims that when luxury beliefs 'trickle down' to the working class, they are damaging, which is supposedly not the case for luxury goods. Still, in some not-so-privileged parts of society, signaling status with luxury goods consumes the larger parts of people's budget. Think of someone living in a cheap apartment while driving a (leased) luxury car. This is certainly more damaging than believing the police should be de-funded (which does not have any consequence whatsoever on the micro-level, stupid as it may be).
2. The author claims that advocating a disciplined work ethic while attributing one's own success to luck is inconsistent (and hence bigoted). Still, it _is_ true that success is mostly luck, due to opportunities we cannot control. This does not mean that one should not work hard. It's not that affluent people say: "I am rich because of luck, so you should not even try." The realistic take is that success is mostly due to luck but hard work is one of the few ways to control success _to at least some extent_. Also, in many societies hard work is seen as a virtue in itself, not matter whether it pays off or not. So I would claim that "hard work pays off" is a luxury belief for people who are already super privileged, have strong networks, et cetera. When you are born into the elite, you can afford claiming that marrying into the elite is inferior to working your way up...
This paper presents formal results, apparently. Also, in the case of formal results, peer review by experts in the exact sub-field makes sense/increases trust, sure, but why not share on archive instead of waiting for a year (or however long the process takes in the particular instance)?
Sweden is for sure not the socialist paradise that some think it is. But the Winter in the (relative) South of Sweden are relatively mild and there are always some hours of sun. I live in the North of Sweden (geographically somewhat north of the center) and while the winters are long, there are always some hours of sunlight, often direct sunlight without clouds, reflected by the snow. It's beautiful. The real problem is that the current inflation, recession and increased unemployment, in combination with the previous habit of infinite-time mortgages and policies that favor the non-working elites, are ruining the social contract...
A key problem in Sweden -- besides the weird interaction of privatization and legacy over-regulation -- is that the current inflation and rising interest rates break the social contract: a relatively even salary distribution allowed many people to have a solid middle-class life style, recently albeit with never-ending mortgages. Now, the interest rates are too high for these mortgages to be even superficially sustainable, people have less money at hand to pay for them, and there is no political will to relief the working and middle class, which means many will slide down the social ladder. As an immigrant living in Sweden I fear that the country will soon be pretty unattractive to live in for most 'internationals' who have a choice.
I'd say the experiment (relying on the summary provided here) shows what works:
- Papers that are obviously poor are rejected.
- Papers that are uncontroversially good are accepted.
From a CS point of view, the problem is that in many communities, what is 'uncontroversially good' depends on subtleties only known to insiders who are willing to comply with the quirks of a community.
And most communities are very defensive when it comes to shielding their top venues from relative outsiders, who are not sufficiently close to the inner circle of key players.
As a consequence, getting the top-venue stamp (required to please the administration) becomes a social game.
I think having a more open review process and stronger editorial control (vs. reviewer power) can mitigate this problem to some extent, for the following reasons:
1. When a paper is good, but upsets the subjective feelings of reviewers, the system should be implemented in a way that there is a high social cost for killing a paper because of subjective/cosmetic issues. Having venues where papers that are sent out to reviewers are most likely reasonable and should only be killed because of 'hard' flaws creates such a system.
2. When a paper is bad and the editors push it through, publishing details of the paper's editorial flow would impose social costs on the editors. (The reviewers, who may be potentially early in their career and may need protection, may even remain anonymous, the editors, who typically enjoy a strong standing in the community, should not.)
In CS, journals tend to operate a bit closer to this model than conferences, which I think makes the journal submission and revision process more meaningful.
To conclude, I don't think getting rid of rejects is the solution, but rather editorial policies that encourage reviewers to either expose fatal technical flaws in a paper or help the authors improve the presentation to achieve a better end-result.
Without being an expert: I know large companies that have a remote-first, fixed country policy, but allow exceptions under special circumstances (e.g., for family reasons). My assumption is that if one wants to support an employee in a good way, it's worth the paperwork in case of such special circumstances, but it's an unacceptable risk to allow it by default and try to play catch-up as a substantial part of the workforce moves around the globe.
I would argue that Musk's Twitter obsession has an outsized effect because i) it is all over the news and even apolitical people get it ii) even a chunk of republicans find it weird (e.g., even Gutfeld on Fox is making unfavorable jokes about Musk) and iii) many Tesla buyers are left-leaning (in Europe, the mainstream is left of the US Democratic establishment), which means for core markets and demographics, a Tesla car can no longer be used as a status symbol.
Of course, the writing was on the wall without Musk buying Twitter: Teslas are now ordinary, mass-produced cars and traditional car manufactures catch up on electric. At the same time, electric cars are still mostly for relatively wealthy people, which means it is appealing to buy an electric car that's not a Tesla in order to stand out more.
There is still plenty of research going on on agents, symbolic AI, and other approaches that sometimes and somewhat reflect (or have informed) ideas from Society of Mind.
Some of the ideas are relevant from an application perspective (for sure, we have complex socio-technical systems where different 'agents' interact), others make it into learning, for example into RL, which was hyped some years go.
Other ideas feel old-fashioned and stuck in the past; this is, in my opinion, not necessarily because the ideas are generally bad, but often because some of the sub-communities move very slowly and struggle to embrace a pragmatic approach to modern applied research.
Generally, I think it's good to maintain 'old' knowledge, and the only way to do so in a sustainable manner is to maintain a diversity of research directions, where plenty of researchers are committed to keep the lights on by slowly advancing directions that are not on top of the hype cycle at the moment.
Still, in B2B you typically want to show you have some megacorp logos (in particular due to larger deal size and up-sell potential), are attractive to different industries, et cetera. So this may be a known issue, but it's also considered when assessing startups.
By common sense: most of academia is monetarily less attractive than Stanford Law School. The salaries of two full professors there make the family at least wealthy, i.e., able to maintain an upper class life.
And the perks of being a full professor at Stanford Law School presumably include very attractive opportunities that can make one rich (able to amass wealth), e.g., well-paid consulting gigs and advisory roles.
But I agree, my distinction between wealthy and rich is pretty sloppy.
Similarly, I don't think it's correct to characterize SBF's background as 'middle class'. Apparently, both of his parents are Profs at Stanford Law School. Most likely, they are wealthy or even rich and SBF could benefit from their network, gaining access to the American elites without too many questions asked.
I also like the general idea, but there seems to be a weird underlying motivation. For me Uber is the prime example for bullshit (in the technical sense of the word) innovation. Stuff like Uber should be considered infrastructure so that the profits can go to the drivers. Perhaps the actual reason for lack of 'real' innovation is that it's not what's the most profitable? After all, nobody became a billionaire because the writer's grandma's town/village got running water and a sewage system.
AFAIK, it is well-known in the industry that Tesla is the only relevant vendor (or at least one of the few) betting on video-only. A couple of years ago, this looked (while risky) more reasonable, given the hype around deep learning-based image recognition (combined with the assumption that humans primarily rely on video). But I suppose most vendors assumed even then that video-only won't be able to handle all edge cases, like bringing a car to a safe stop in case video is non-workable in an extreme situation.
As somebody who does some 'mathy' theoretical CS work, I wonder if this will stay true forever, for the following reasons:
* The general population, but also academics, take increasingly more time to mature.
* The body of knowledge grows and mastering it takes more time.
* People (at least the privileged elites) spend more time taking care of their mental and physical health. For example, we see that athletes competing in team sports on top level may reach their peak in their mid-30ies, which is a relatively recent development. If one translates this to math (I know it is a shaky assumption, but why not speculate) and peak creativity is reached in the mid-30ies, the papers that result from it may be published years later.
* In some decades, people will most likely frequently use software tools as helpers.
Not that I think that these developments change things completely, but I would expect that we will see a substantial shift.
Of course there is some correlation between the two skillsets (with respect to ability): people who can abstract well can also understand the underlying ideas that are useful for fast calculation, and for both one needs to have a reasonably good memory (to rely on in an exam and when developing a mathematical intuition, respectively). But to be the best in high school 'math' (calculation) requires a degree of extrinsically-driven, dull discipline. One can probably be best in class without taking this degree to the extreme, but among the best in class, many excel at exactly this (and not at abstract thinking), which I find a bit troubling.
The obviously realistic assessment is: it depends.
Sure, there are politics in industry, but most large corporations have large R&D organizations were politics are manageable and predictable, at least for individual contributors and team leads, simply because this is a crucial environmental factor and critical for retaining talent and getting products shipped. Politics primarily happen on higher levels and in particularly competitive parts of the organization (like Sales).
In academia (in contrast), the governance structures that are in place essentially ensure that with the exception of the particularly lucky (or: 'genius') few, one always has to watch one's back to ensure the fight for employment, funding, research time, top-venue acceptance, tenure, etc. is successful.
I think you are right. But my argument was addressing the crypto-bullish assumption that crypto goes up (i.e., assuming long-term deflation) and that one should 'invest' in it as a responsible parent (as implied by the parent comment that I was responding to). So assuming a (potentially counterfactual) deflation was a strategy for my argument (like in a formal proof by contradiction).
Buying crypto is not 'investing in technology'. Also, a currency with massive deflation is not usable. You can't go to the moon forever AND have a usable currency. So even if one bets on adoption of crypto and is risk averse (e.g., to not endanger one's family), the best is to not buy crypto. By now, there are most likely already plenty of families falling apart because plenty of guys (many of whom live under problematic socio-economic conditions/are poorly educated/adopted a responsible lifestyle too late in their lives) followed exactly your line of argumentation. Is there really any doubt that this is happening?
I think it is way too early to discard the underlying technology and I think/hope that parts of the open source ecosystem will survive. Reckless speculation being the current primary use case does not mean there won't be any societally more beneficial use case in the future.
The idea is that 4-hours work weeks for relatively highly skilled knowledge workers will actually help lower the costs for the social security system (less burnouts, early retirements) and a more productive society (instead of 'grinding out' pointlessly long hours, work less and contribute to society in your free time) -- work is merely one way to be productive in society.
I think the (hopefully) more realistic action plan would be to change the academic system so that the average academic does not need to spend what amounts to the full official working hours on non-research tasks, latest after their first Post Doc, i.e., ~2 years after reaching academic maturity...
In Sweden, students and graduate students are well-organized/unionized, but the situation for PostDocs and other post-doctoral fixed-term employed academics is dire nonetheless, in particular for immigrants, for whom the fixed-term contracts cause problems with their residence permits, considering recent changes in immigration laws.
This is a very interesting comment, but this statement is concerning: "Corporations are supposed to be automata that optimize an objective function."
Of course, from the perspective of neoclassical economics, it is true, and of course, there are obligations to shareholders. But generally, I think it is great that corporations are not automata that optimize an objective function. Corporations are social organizations, and I think it roughly holds that the harder the problem is that a corporation is solving for some business purpose, the more space it needs to give for social aspects. It's not that all of management thinks about profit optimization from morning to evening.
The question is: what is bloat? Is everything that depends on Electron bloated? I'd say yes, and there's a lot of non-enterprise software that uses electron.
So I'd rather say what is special about enterprise software are UI/UX-trade-offs that are unimaginable for consumer software.
And these trade-offs are often (not always) reasonable.
Isn't the real development that automation and efficiency improvements move more and more people into bullshit jobs? So instead of becoming entirely obsolete, we continue working, not knowing what value we contribute, if any.
That's why my intuition (and fear) is that in such BS jobs, the rewards will become more and more skewed. So instead of a 9-5 corporate BS job, one gets a highly competitive BS job (evaluated using metrics that are poor predictors and assessors of individual quality of work) in a high-pressure environment.
I don't think that these papers will earn the author a PhD, and I also don't think that this is a goal. Looking at the references, the author seems to like to publish such analyses on the arXiv, which is arguably not really what it is meant for; but still, it's a pre-print server so who cares.
The title here is imprecise and misleading. "Droplets that contain the Covid virus" would presumably be a bit more precise. Also the paper is a preprint, so one should be particularly careful with strong statements.