charia

'As many as', suggests there might have been one particular case where that happened, probably due to a complex situation, (small company, pandemic, company going out of business, lack of strong oversight, policies on returning equipment not set in place at the time of layoffs, ect).

Using that one particular statistic to make this point seems like an obvious use of bad statistics. The average or median is probably much more normal, and probably a huge number of computers worth a good chunk of money, but it doesn't sound that eyecatching so they choose to go with this particular number.

I'm not sure if there's any history of financial association, but I do know that all of these people generally travel in the same circles.

When I went to college in Berkeley I went to a couple rationalism adjacent events in the city and saw there was a huge overlap of that EA/Rationalism/Silicon Valley startups people. Never saw Sam Altman at those, but met a couple YC founders and other people who knew him and spoke generally well of him.

This is a quite uncharitable view of things. EA utilitiarians aren't spending their life on optimizing numbers, they're trying to use numbers to guide decisions on how to better impact life.

People can follow a value systems and still understand that other value systems exist.

The EA view of things is pretty simple to understand. Given the premise of limited resources, and a belief that all lives are worth the same, how can you best improve human livelihood?

Different people approach giving back to society in different ways. The EA way to approach the above is to crunch numbers and find what they think is the place where their limited resources can have have the largest impact.

My best friend's family does their part by joining their church to volunteer at food kitchens in poorer neighborhoods and hosting fundraisers for various causes throughout the year.

A Vietnamese coworker of mine used to give back by donating to a charity that gave scholarship opportunities to high achieving low income students in Vietnam.

It's not that complex to understand that different people have different value systems and how they view their tribe, people and the world.

And yes I agree that lots of people find people who hold differing views incomprehensible, but that's also normal aspect of humanity and not unique to those in EA.

From political differences, to philosophical differences, to religious differences, to any topic, many people have a hard time comprehending the worldview of others.

You can even just take the perspective from this article. There are a whole swath of people I've known that could not comprehend the idea that someone would be willing to give their kidney to a total stranger. They might understand if its someone the person knows, but a total stranger? Some might say that's insane and irrational behavior.

Lots of people can't see past their own perspectives on things, but I think it's uncharitable to suggest that EA is not just like any other group with some portion of people like that.

People complaining about the fairness about legacies and donor children miss the point that these people are half the reasons people care about these top private schools.

If you want a meritocratic institution that is actually reasonably priced and provide great educations, then that's what a state school is for. Or like the few private institutions that are actually meritocratic (MIT, caltech)

Elite schools are for the children of elites who will inherit some amount of that power (political, wealth, ect) and for a small cream of normal people who have the iq, eq and luck to be chosen. The goal is to let these people mix. That way in 20 years after graduation when a brilliant mathematician has discovers a powerful algorithm that he has an inkling that it could apply to the stock market, he can phone up a college roommate that had an extremely wealthy dad in finance. The rich heir roommate can join and fund the venture that might billions on the stock market. Or the fact that an official in the state department went to college with the then daughter of South Africa's president, chances are that daughter still is influential. They can talk and maybe broker some aspect of foreign policy. They are finishing schools for the elite. Whether we like it or not, society's next generation of elite includes the most capable children of the current elite. Evn if those children are less capable than the most capable of the general populace, they stand to inherit quite a bit and they will have an outsized impact on the country and world. Their parent's and ancestors influence is important in their acceptance process because it's important in real life.

There is no real solution to this. There's a reason that despite America growing in pop insanely, foreign applications increasing exponentially, billions being donated to them and everyone going to college, these elite institutions have barely changed class sizes.

The exclusivity and mixing of the different types of people is a feature of these places. If you somehow get these top institutions to be more meritocraric like MIT or Caltech or increase overall student body size like ASU all that will happen is that individuals with power, wealth and influence will simply slowly coordinate to send their kids to different schools and soon enough those schools will face this scrutiny again.

Now I can understand that it is extremely unfair that when all our Supreme Court justices, significant numbers of national politicians, power brokers and many individuals with outsized influence come from a few institutions. If you are one of the many intelligent, hardworking and capable individuals who don't get in when others who are probably just as good as you might, it is extremely annoying. Their entire trajectory of life is changed because of luck that you didn't get. But sometime life is like that. College does not exist in a vacuum and just like most things in life, influence and wealth are powerful.

Those with power tend to want their descendants to have some of that at least and they will do what they can to perpetute that.

I want to say I'm not saying that this is perfect or even great. I'm just saying the way humans work and the way incentive structures are setup, this is how it is. To not mention this is to be ignorant. If you want to improve the status quo you need to acknowledge the reality of the situation and plan around this.

I did not attend one of these institutions for the record.

I don't know if I'd subscribe to the above person's ideas, but the simple business approach would probably work right?

Treat it like any form of behavior that creates a hostile work environment and thereby lowers overall workplace productivity. Businesses are incentivized to keep things running in the most productive method possible.

Discrimination costs your business in lowering employee productivity and other affects like possibly losing talent or opportunities. Warning discriminating employees that their behavior could cost them their job or simply firing them depending on the severity of the situation seems like a simple enough solution?

I think it's more mocking the oversimplification of complex problems.

That though caste discrimination causes significant harm and problems in the Indian and Indian diaspora communities, not every, "bad thing", stem from caste discrimination in specific.

The idea that sexism and other terrible things can be prevelant issues that need to be addressed better but they are not necessarily related to caste.

I think one thing to keep in mind is that Wyclef famously used his celebrity to raise money for Haiti after the earthquake and it was shown that much, if not most, of the money raised was used by Wyclef and his family/friends for personal spending.

That behavior suggests that Wyclef might have continued the same corruption that other Haitian politicians engaged in and maybe taken it a step further by leveraging his celebrity to also pocket money brought in as outside investment.

Again, maybe he couldn't be worse since other Haitian politicians would have and did engage in similar corruption, but it'd be a stretch to say that it's anything we should consider as "what if" that would had the real potential for positive change in the country.

OP is probably talking about the legality of American hospitals using this software in an official capacity like some Chinese hospitals seem to be doing.

I'm completely unfamiliar, but it wouldn't surprise me if for diagnosing? software like this to be used in an official medical capacity in America it would need to go through some sort of particular vetting process because if it isn't it might leave hospitals who use it open to lawsuits.

Do you genuinely believe that laws that try to separate criticize versus insult can work?

I can't see anything other than laws like that being abused by politicians and government officials to quell speech and create a chilling effect amongst the populace.

Yeah, and for a father to take paternity leave suggests the father's job and family's financial situation are doing reasonably well. Financial stability plays a huge factor in keeping couples together.

It's very naive to assume it'll only ever be used for benevolent purposes.

The situation the above commenter was bringing up was that in the near future your genetic information has a good chance of being used by insurance companies pre-judge you, your offspring and your relatives to raise or lower healthcare rates based on information found in that data.

Discord has a huge userbase of pre-teen and teenage gamers, so your explanation makes sense here.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_...

Property tax is generally determined by the average price of housing in an area. California's prop 13 allowed people to lock in their property tax based on when they bought it. Its been beneficial for retirees and older folks in California who bought their houses decades ago and if forced to pay the taxes based on current valuation would be forced to sell their house and move.

Its received a lot of criticism from people who point out that it's inherently unfair and how that the tax level stays the same if the owner dies and passes the house on to their kids. It also receives a lot of criticism because it also applies to businesses. One particularly egregious example is a country club in the middlebof LA that exists on prime developmental land and normally would be paying huge taxes pays nominal fees and is only available to the extremely wealthy that can afford to join it.

Prop 13 did get some reform last November in regards to inheritance and flexibility for homeowners.

This is hacker news and so I'm trying to not just post a low effort reply, but reddit.com/r/menkampf is all about taking that premise and running with it.

Before finding that subreddit, I didn't notice how just how commonplace casually insulting men was accepted.

I do understand the power difference that isn't one to one and why this sort of insulting is accepted, in that men are not a real minority like Jewish people are so culturally insulting men is a considered a punching up situation.

Still, I think the proliferation and casual acceptance of the rhetoric people use in this context is not exactly healthy for society.

So uh, who's going to be the arbiter of what exactly constitutes intolerant or harmful speech? You? Me? Facebook? The government? Twitter?

Whoever gets the power to define what's acceptable and not acceptable speech is given too much power. You might trust that arbiter now, tomorrow, but do you honestly believe their incentives will always remain pure?

I mean this has happened with Instagram accounts historically.

https://medium.com/@behoff/they-say-nothing-will-change-5c54...

A tangent about Cuties, but felt like airing my thoughts on this somewhere.

The outrage over Cuties is some of the weirdest situations of political/cultural toxoplasma I've seen.

The movie has nothing that's considered abnormal to what pre-teens and teens are exposed and engage in modern western culture. Girls are exposed to the dances/ect that sexualize them everywhere from social media platforms (tiktok, ect) and in person (regular middle school/high school stuff). The dances in cuties are very meh in by those measurements.

The movie tries to take a look at this, "norm," and displays something that's somewhat normal in a movie format. It's especially weird that the movie got it's backlash from conservatives b/c the message is arguably somewhat conservative.

The story is a girl coming from a extremely conservative background embracing the supposedly pro-women modern liberal western culture. By showing this the character and the viewers question if modern western cultural attitudes to women and their sexualization is actually better than the treatment of women in conservative cultures.

SPOILERS: It ends with the character embracing some sort of middle path that leaves you asking if that's even possible.

Like if you believe in the backlash against Cuties and the sexualization of the kids in modern society, that backlash should be more directed a backlash against places like tiktok/ect that encourage pre-teens/teens to copy/perform sexualized dances for money/street cred.

I'd wager that in twoish years we'll see articles talking about the Remote Office Trap.

Over the years we've seen a huge surge of individuals talking about the benefits of remote work and there are many. I'm not trying to ignore those benefits in any way, but there are downsides and I have little faith in most corporations to do a good job of addressing these new found problems in an optimal manner. And what works for some portion of the workforce (some amount of workers like open offices), might not be optimal for another significant portion of the workforce.

Speculating on possible problem points in articles about remote work:

I would guess they will simply see the savings in office costs and pass on very small portion of that, leaving employees with the need to now rent/buy bigger houses to allocate space for a permanent home office situation. Other problems include a possible increase in always on-call attitudes in that, managers will feel even more open to ask employees to work on something at non-standard hours since it's simply a matter of walking a couple steps to their desk. Workplaces are filled with humans and without causal interaction outside of standard work related meetings, I wonder how people will care about each other. Will employees have less empathy for each other since bonds between them are weaker? Things like asking for help someone on a task is harder if you're not as familiar with them. I wonder what other changes we'll see.

It's literally what one of the protestors called it.

“Telegram channels and websites that don’t belong to our government are the main source of information today as we cannot at all rely on state media,” said Roman Semenov, who follows the NEXTA channels and joined a rally in central Minsk on Wednesday evening. “It’s a Telegram revolution.”

On top of that this is article detailing how this particular technology, has made a significant impact for the protesters.

“The fate of the country has never depended so much on one [piece] of technology,” Viacorka said.

There have been a number of articles and news coverage of this topic. That this one article focused on the technology aspect of the protesters and protesting does not make it, "tech propaganda."

For the same reason why people are against high level government officials anywhere getting pay raises. The public perceives it as a waste of money and believe that public servants should be solely motivated by the work and not the money. People forget that paying people who have significantly disproportionate power well makes them less likely to be tempted by outside influences.

The second is because that looks very weird and improper. It's a government job and the person who works gets compensated. Not taking a salary would make his tenure and situation even more abnormal. It also sets a bad precedent for potential future holders of the job.

The better option would be to accept the salary and donate it alongside the fortune he has vowed to give away.

Any view can be described as intolerant. Stamping out, “intolerant” views is one of the reasons many authoritarian regimes uses to stamp out dissent.

The United States did this when it persecuted leftist sympathizing folks back in the 50's. "If we don't kill communism, then communism will kill our society. These filthy socialists and communists preach intolerance with rhetoric against the hardworking American. Tolerating them will only get us killed."

The USSR did this by sending people who questioned party agenda straight to the gulags. "By going against party thinking, these people are pushing for an intolerant society that is stratified with the class structures of old. We need to get rid of them before they ruin our perfect tolerant society."

The same logic is used to try to stamp out Muslims in countries like India right now and other places in the world historically. "If we leave the intolerant Muslims around, they'll bring forth Jihad and enforce Sharia law on everyone. The Koran is very intolerant about how non-Muslims should be treated, we need to force them out because their intolerant views are a threat to tolerance everywhere."

Literally every Christian country post-Martin Luther in the middle ages used that logic to wage wars on other Christian countries. Not just Christian vs. Christian of course. It's why countries in the past fought against each other over religion so much. When intolerance is defined as views that I don't agree with, it becomes kill or be killed world.

One of the best features of the enlightenment thinking is the concept of tolerance. One of the fundamental principles of Western thought. The idea that, we might have fundamentally opposing views, but can we interact without having to resort to a scorched earth policy. It started with Christians tolerating other sects of Christianity, but it’s now encompassed nearly every historical division.

The paradox of tolerance is inherently wrong, because true tolerance requires you to be tolerant to beliefs that you believe are intolerant.

Anyone who was born in California after 1983, has had their DNA collected by the state.

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/05/08/california-biob...

This short story from Aaron Swartz' blog changed my life.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/handwritingwall

It played a significant role in shaping my understanding of humanity, charity and what impact as a single human being can have. It was a big factor in why I joined the Effective Altruism movement and donate 10+% of my income yearly. I highly recommend reading it.

It saddens me greatly that person who was so forward thinking and was only looking out for the future of humanity was taken away so young.

Taibbi's been on a roll with his writing recently. His breakdown of the current state of the American press is also quite illuminating.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-i...

This is a mistake in the understanding of the situation. The NYTimes and all major press outlets anonymize sources. For example for this article, the NYTimes journalist gave people who spoke with him about SSC the choice to remain anonymous.

The article was going to frame Scott as a subject. The real debate is if subjects of articles also deserve full anonymity. The NYTimes' policy is to generally not give subjects a right to anonymity.

The New Yorker article author does bring up another article the NYTimes published about Chapo Trap House where host Virgil Texas was one of the subjects but also given anonymity.

The question is if the decision not to give Scott anonymity as a subject despite others receiving it in recent history is one borne out of maliciousness, callousness, incompetence or a cultural disagreement between NYTimes reporter and an internet blogger.

I'm fairly sure that #ghostnyt was a reaction to the NYTimes airing of the Tom Cotton op-ed. I don't doubt that some SSC fans latched onto it, but I'd be surprised if even a third of those using #ghostnyt were from SSC aligned people.

The hotels in any city would lobby to kill any sort of government intrusion into the private sector like that.

On top of that cities prefer nice compartmentalized systems, short term rentals are hotels, long term rentals are apartments. City planners designate different areas for different use cases, airbnb style rentals go against this and raise all sorts of problems. This is one of the major reasons why cities generally dislike airbnb.

I used to criticize the big tech companies for stockpiling dozens of billions of dollars instead of investing them into their businesses, but it's only now I can see why a move like that was wise.

If at all possible, businesses, like people, should keep a rainy day fund. I wonder if all the companies that used their money for stock buybacks are kicking themselves in the foot right now.

You realize that the retail business can be quite difficult and that a monthlong shuttering can and will drive many into bankruptcy. Rent payments without income will put the nail in the coffin for many businesses.

I do agree with your sentiment. Paying their workers who are probably struggling significantly at the moment would be ideal. I don't feel that landlords need the $'s as much as those workers.

This is very, very, very dependant on your experiences. My family is from India and they've told me some fascinating stories of the lengths some Catholic charities and churches are willing to go to convert people.