abusoufiyan

Okay, can you answer what I asked?

A few million people died in Iraq as well under the super-egalitarian, meritocratic, no equality of outcomes democracy of the USofA, so why does choice matter so much?

I don't know how boards work, but can't they just expand the number of seats on the board?

This is why very progressive countries implement combined paternal and maternal leave. If one spouse doesn't take it, the couple loses that time.

The pressure on men and women to take time off after a baby diminishes the effect you speak of.

It is repeatable and testable

Except when it isn't and when it isn't.

A vast majority of articles published right now will never even be reproduced and yet we take nearly all of them as if they are gospel.

If the meaning of life exists, it must be possible to find it with science. I see no contradictions here. If you see, you are welcome to reveal them if you will.

Science is based on some kinds of assumptions taken on faith (like every thought system). Here are a few (there are more surely).

1) Everything is observable to us as human beings.

2) Everything scientific will be reproduced and confirmed by someone else despite there being very few financial incentives for anyone to undertake all this costly reproduction and confirmation.

For (1), we know that there can be multiple dimensions, yes. A 2d figure can never really experience and observe the third dimension. He can only wonder about it, ponder about it, conjecture about it, but never know it because his physical senses will not let him understand that third dimension. Observations are powerful but they are limited by our observing senses. For (2) there have been countless hoax papers snuck into scientific journals, I don't need to cover this too much. Most scientific work is not reproduced, but posting it online will make most people think it is true.

You also forget that the meaning of life may exist and yet operate in a way we cannot sense. Just as there are planets we cannot see and may never be able to confirm.

That kid when he grows up might indeed feel weird about all the undeserved money...

Are you serious? How is taking money from one person who never worked for it and giving it to another person who never worked for it going to make one feel self-conscious and sympathetic to the other?

Personally, I don't think striving for equality of outcome will do society any good.

Well, isn't it just convenient that if we don't strive for equality of outcome then life will just have to remain tilted in favor of white/asian men

What we, as a society need to do is to encourage men to be less sexist, for instance, a manger who can hire a male and a female who are both eligble should not hire a male because he 'doesn't want female', that needs to be fixed.

But there are no managers who will say that. They'll rationalize it a different way that people will buy into.

I have seen the reservation system in India and it is horrible, to be honest, it only helps the top % people but the bottom of the food chain is exactly where they were since the start, the bottom of the food chain.

I have also, and this is the point of the reservation system, to create wealthy powerhouse families in a society which had very few from those castes. For everyone who complains about it, there are many more who appreciate it for the good it does and who understand that reservations are not meant to eliminate poverty (else they'd be based on financial status) but are meant to build power and concentrated wealth in communities which had no opportunities to have such.

In India, before reservations generational wealth had cemented a very strong hierarchy. Overturning that hierarchy cannot be done solely by providing education equally, there has to be a balance shift somewhere. People are not going to voluntarily give away their inherited wealth and status, so similar wealth and status needs to be built in other communities. The best way to do this is educate some select few in that community, then perhaps they gain wealth from it, now their children get the same education they did, they inherit wealth and build some more, repeat repeat and now you have powerful families in underprivileged communities which could rival the ones in the privileged ones.

Imposter syndrome is real. But if you are literally on the board of a company, I doubt it matters as much. Also, lots of people inherited rather than earned their wealth. Should we outlaw that to save them from imposter syndrome?

Depends on where you are. Not all of these apply everywhere, but:

- lack of maternity leave

- being judged on personal appearance even in office settings because your appearance is more tied to your worth than it is for men

- when you are harsh as a boss, labelled "bossy" as a negative. I don't hear many men labelled "bossy".

- be chided about "being on your period" in case you say something people don't like

- people confusing you for secretary / non-technical role because you are not man

- people talking about things which may be sensitive to women in the workplace moreso than men and make them uncomfortable / unable to participate (for example, porn, I have seen this in my office)

- after-hours fraternizing at the bar or on the golf course (or other largely men's activity, it's never going to the salon, for example).

- harrassment / dating propositions (imo, it's not okay either way but obviously more likely for men to do to women in office than the other way around)

- late-night meetings, frequent expectation for workers to come in late and stay late (if women mostly take responsibilities of children at home, this affects them more).

- less pay because rather than keeping pays equal, companies only offer raises to those who ask

Surely there are others. Perhaps some of these seem innocuous to you, but altogether they are potent.

Even if you are a woman that really deserved to lead some company, people will think that you just got there because of the quota.

That's their problem. They want to vocalize it, well you can fire them!

Yeah but most of the outright wrong and sexist things our societies allow seem to disadvantage women. This doesn't make it even, but it's a good step.

Makes zero sense

And what do you want to work on?

This is such a silly way of thinking.

Everything in the world cannot be proven. Everything that cannot be proven sufficiently to you right now shouldn't be assumed to be untrue.

It just shouldn't go to Iran.

And you just have to make sure that any charity you donate to doesn't eventually get revealed to have been a sham where the people running it were secretly funneling the money to armed militants without your knowledge because then you can go to jail for the rest of your life (unless of course your name is Reagan and you funnel arms directly to the militants yourself!)

Few things I realized learning AI/ML in school and being around people who claimed to care about "social good" and "ethics":

1) As long as engineers chase after money and prestige first, there will be no ethical AI/ML. We live in a society which values money and status over everything else, especially moral values (it's quite trendy these days to reject traditional moral values, in fact). If that doesn't change, the incentives to create unethical, untransparent and unfair AI/ML don't change either.

2) The trendiness of ethical / fair AI/ML is the only thing it has going for it, and if companies can coopt it while actually using AI/ML for unethical goals, they will do so happily (for instance, if they were to sponsor ethical AI conferences or papers while still using AI to spy on people and draw up lists of possible terrorists without hard evidence, ala Palantir).

3) There is no desire to have a hardline, this is right and that is wrong code of ethics like doctors do with their Hippocratic oath and a large part of this is the entanglement that a lot of AI/ML research has with the military. It's not possible to talk about ethics and ignore the fact that lots of this AI/ML research is going towards killing over 1 million innocent civilians in Iraq. And yet, nearly all the labs which do this research receive US military funding. When this is the case, you have to leave loopholes for people to reason their way into justifying things which are, to most people's base instincts, morally wrong. And that leaves a kind of ethics where everything is ultimately permissible provided you think about it hard enough, in other words no ethics at all.

It means it was heavily downvoted. Others don't agree with us. That's okay though. At least I'm not alone!

Meaning of life isn't going to be found by scientific knowledge. Sorry to burst your bubble.

May I ask why you want to own a house? I am kind of realizing that the majority of people in the world do not own a house.

Then why would he say things like:

What you see is two cultures separated by an almost unimaginable amount of time, distance, and history. The clash that occurred would have been hard to prevent whenever it happened.

Because surely there was more they had in common than that made them different.

Personally, I think trade policy needs to be intimately connected to human rights and environmental and labor conditions.

It's never ever ever going to happen. Be careful what you wish for. If what you wanted to happen happened, you would be paying over $100 for the same shirt that costs you $6 in Walmart right now.

I also want to point out that, yes, in a globally competitive world wages become globally competitive. If a Chinese worker with an infirm grandmother is surviving on a lower wage than an American was making without an infirm grandmother, then that American needs to find better work, do better quality work, or take a pay cut. We would never force consumers to buy products produced only by ethical means or only by human-rights approved conditions (if that were the case, no more chocolate!). Why would we do that to multinational companies?

There aren't other options available. No President is going to preside over the term where all the trade deals were made alongside human rights conditionals and all the goods skyrocketed in price leading to another Great Depression.

We live in a world where Obama tried to excuse Malaysian slavery in order to try and enact a trade deal so that American workers could be forced to compete with slaves in Malaysia.

You can boohoo about it all you want, but your chocolate, your coffee, your clothes, and your computer parts are all made by or had their materials harvested by slaves, and most likely you would scoff at voluntarily paying twice the price for all those commodities. I'm not saying everyone should be enslaved. But if consumers have the right to purchase such ill-made goods, then companies have the right to offshore their labor forces to such places too.

I don't see AI/ML following the same pattern.

AI/ML which can mine through sports footage to create highlight reels and funny clip collections, etc will create tons of consumer goods (videos) which can all be monetized on Youtube. Just one example.

How about Netflix? They use AI/ML quite a bit. It seems to have driven quite a lot more people to watch movies and tv than before.

Amazon uses AI/ML in its Echo, which was quite a high-selling consumer good last holiday season.

So, does that mean that cultures currently engaged in war are less civilized than cultures currently disengaged from war?

The Americas went from 50-100 million people to fewer than 5 million natives because of disease.

Disease which was quite forcefully spread by Europeans as an act of warfare....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...

As Montaigne pointed out, early modern Europeans were at least as cruel toward enemies and captives, they just expressed it in different ways: i.e. via public executions of witches and heretics, or the tortures of the Inquisition and secular courts.

Yes, this was my instant thought. What a naive Eurocentric way to think of history to insinuate that everyone except the Europeans were just barbaric savages who killed and devalued life. As if the Europeans weren't fresh off their own multi-year killing sprees for this and that reason that equally would have baffled Native Americans.

I agree with everything except one minor detail. Not sure if outsourcing and offshoring are such bad things. I mean, if someone will work for less than you, you either need to do better work, do cheaper work, or find different work.

I worry that attempts to smooth it out can actually cause worse disruption.

Like, let's say we know factory workers will be laid off, so we need to allocate resources to retrain them.

Very likely the resources will not be enough for all the workers. So who gets them and who doesn't will become a political battle, with the left-out group resenting everyone in society and society ignoring their needs because it reminds them that they left them behind.

And then you build a society where one group's triumph is based on another's suppression, and you can see where this is going...

End game is to move back home and bring back the share of the first world which was stolen from my home and planted there.

Exactly.

Lots of people don't want to play in the Eastern European basketball league. They specifically want to play in the NBA. It's not about basketball, it's about the perks.

Sidenote: Other than the height, the absurd athleticism and skill at shooting ball are grown over a long period of hard work. Nanotechnology cannot substitute for hard work and years of learning the strategies and techniques of playing the game...