virissimo

Panic rooms are already cheap for the "rich people" mentioned in the article, which is the point I was making by characterizing "cheapness" as being relative, not absolute, so the analogy holds.

"Cheap" isn't absolute, but is relative to your level of wealth. When airbags first hit the market, they were too expensive for most car buyers and, in fact, most cars didn't get them until decades later. Presumably, the people in the article are wealthier than you or I, and they aren't acting irrationally any moreso than the early adopters (relative to the the late adopters) of airbags.

  And interestingly, the owners who spoke to Robb Report noted only a handful of times their rooms were ever used in an emergency. The notion of safety, however, is perhaps priceless.

The writer's implied argument can easily be shown to be defective by replacing the referenced object with an analogous one (device used to make bad rare events less bad given they happen):

  Interestingly, only a handful of drivers have every actually used their airbags. The notion of safety, however, is perhaps priceless.

There are many variants of Occam's razor, but one commonality among them is that it is for comparing hypotheses that predict the same data (namely, the the simpler one should be preferred).

But in the case of COVID-19 lab escape versus zoonotic origin, the latter doesn't predict that the Chinese government and EcoHealth Alliance would attempt a coverup of the virus origins, so we really aren't talking about two hypothesis that explain the (same) data, and therefore this isn't really an appropriate candidate for the application of Occam's razor.

Perhaps politicians don't crack down on three letter agencies because when they try, their careers are ruined by those same three letter agencies. Here's an example: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/48603/did-the-c.... See this for a previous HN discussion of the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25397168#25409105.

Tuft & Needle | Multiple Engineering Roles | Remote (US) | https://www.tuftandneedle.com/

In 2012, Tuft & Needle disrupted the mattress industry by offering a customer-focused, digitally-native alternative to traditional mattress chains. Since then, more and more similar brands have followed in our wake presenting new challenges and a different type of customer confusion. With people at the heart of everything we do, we know it’s now time for us to define our next chapter. Rest should be a universal right and with that as our North Star, we are setting out to radically reshape how the world thinks about sleep and the impact it can have in our lives. But our success in making great products and exceptional experiences depends on our ability to create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment. We welcome applicants from underrepresented backgrounds and all walks of life because we know a diverse environment is essential to our success in making better sleep accessible to all.

Roles Available:

    - Senior Rails Software Engineer, Purchase Experience
    - React Software Engineer, Product Discovery
    - Senior Rails Software Engineer, Product Discovery

https://jobs.lever.co/tuftandneedle/a29ddbe7-34db-4d3a-bf29-...

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Tech:

At T&N you will be working in an environment consisting primarily of React, GraphQL, Ruby, Rails, and Postgres, and deployed to Heroku and Vercel. We use Buildkite for continuous integration and believe strongly in continuous deployment.

You can contact me about the openings at jayson.virissimo@tuftandneedle.com. I'm the hiring manager for our purchase experience team, but if you are interested in the others I'll get you in contact with the right person.

I read "The Crucible" in a high school English class and it significantly affected my political outlook, but having learned more of the history of that era (much of it not public knowledge when I first read it and certainly not when it was written) it's no longer clear to me that it still works as allegory.

From the article: "McCarthy—brash and ill-mannered but to many authentic and true—boiled it all down to what anyone could understand: we had “lost China” and would soon lose Europe as well, because the State Department—staffed, of course, under Democratic Presidents—was full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals. It was as simple as that."

Well, as the Venona project cables declassified in 1995 show, the State Department didn't just contain intellectuals that were pro-Soviet: it contained actual Soviet agents in contact with the USSR. This was by no means restricted to the State Department, but also included the Treasury, OSS (pre-CIA), and even the White House. See here: https://web.archive.org/web/20110514040131/http://www.access....

In addition, it is now known that the CIA ran an operation, at the request of Allen Dulles, to feed McCarthy false information about who in the government were Soviet spies with the deliberate purpose of discrediting him: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/48603/did-the-c....

Maybe this calls for a remake of "The Crucible", not as tragedy, but as supernatural horror.

I definitely agree that SRS can reasonably be thought of as a learning superpower. I very much regret that I didn't start using Anki until college.

To save my own kids from such a regret, I've created Boethius, a SRS web application for the classical liberal arts to augment our homeschool curriculum. It's now in public beta here: https://www.boethi.us/.

Let me know what you think!

Fixed!

schoen, thanks for giving it a shot!

You are absolutely right about the declension exercises: they are ambiguous. I'll add more context to the statement when I get back to my workstation.

Gratias tibi!

Boethius (https://www.boethi.us/) is an app I made for my 7yo son to supplement his homeschooling curriculum. It involves completed "daily workouts" of exercises drawn from the seven classical liberal arts (grammar, arithmetic, astronomy, etc...).

The "Try Random Exercise" button lets you see immediately what it's like to use, but signing up is required to get most of the benefits, such as:

* A logical ordering of exercises (learn how to recognize nouns before learning about pronouns, learn what an argument is before learning the difference between validity and soundness, etc...),

* Spaced repetition (you review those you are struggling with most, but those you ace are brought up less frequently over time)

* Configuring your experience (select the number of exercises you need to complete each day for your "daily workout", whether to play audio by default or not, etc..)

* Creating any number of child accounts so you can keep tabs on your kids' progress over time

AMA

I don't agree at all that the EU has handled the pandemic well. See https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS... for a comparison of the US, EU, and East Asia (a region that could reasonably be characterized as handling the pandemic well) by linear per capita confirmed COVID-19 deaths.

Ah, they are free now, so perhaps my impression is out of date.

In general, Europe may have better provision of public goods, but I’m not sure this is true in the current context. For example, it’s much easier to find a free-to-use restroom in Phoenix, Arizona than in Paris, France.

It's terrible what happened to Bruno, but he was a mystic that engaged in rank speculation and did approximately zero science. It seems much more likely that he was killed for claiming that the devil won't be condemned and that Jesus was just a magician than for affirming a kind of heliocentrism. Sad story, yes. Hero of science, no.

"The second-century Stoic sage Epictetus argued that "Your will needn't be affected by an incident unless you let it". In other words, we can be masters and not victims of fate because what we believe our capability to be determines the strength of that capability."

That is absolutely not what Epictetus meant. In fact, like other Stoics, he taught his students a technique called negative visualization that is literally the opposite of positive thinking. The author couldn't have picked a worse example of an ancient precursor to positive psychology.