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The reverse surprised me too: From seeing only abstract drawings of dogs, my daughter pointed at a real dog for the first time and said “dog!”

ML is pretty long way from being able to make generalizations like that from…20 samples?

Making things look pretty is very good for your portfolio and career. But making things usable usually means ugly.

Thin scrollbars and window borders are pretty. Mobile buttons with only icons but no text are pretty. Hiding functionality is pretty.

Who knows, if voting doesn’t motivate them, but concerts do, maybe it will cause more people to get IDs. Isn’t that a good thing?

It’s really disturbing to pass a value judgement about what kind of fans are more desirable than others, and social-engineering it into the pricing structure.

Alas, every metric that isn’t “paying more money” can be horrendously gamed and corrupted. This is why despite all its flaws, the “price signal” is still the tried and true “least bad way to allocate scarce resources” for most cases.

This SCOTUS case had heavy emphasis on the fact Affirmative Action as it is practiced at elite institutions today, has a net slightly negative effect on whites, and an extremely large negative effect on Asians applicants. It is in practice, a large transfer of elite diplomas from Asian to Black students. Black people have indeed suffered greatly historically. Yet an awkward question remains: Why are Asians paying the price?

The age of average 3 years ago

The article says “averaging”, you say “converging”, but what if the operative verb is actually “optimizing”?

Certain looks get the most followers on Instagram. Movie posters are tested against focus groups. Market forces reward high end coffee shops that look a certain way. To me, the thread all of these have in common is optimization towards a certain goal.

And thus the sadness in our hearts is the feeling that aesthetics has been subsumed as yet another optimization problem.

Juice 3 years ago

Adding hold-delays to anything is the opposite of juicy.

One thing Americans do not have much experience with, is how the exercise policing speech eventually becomes the exercise of policing coded speech.

People will always get around speech rules by speaking in code. China has probably some of the richest history of speech suppression followed by very clever subversive speech. The most recent example being the use of empty white sheets of paper to get around censorship algorithms.

So the censors now must police coded speech as well, and this is where things get extremely dangerous. Because one can take great liberties in defining what contains encoded wrong speak. You already see this in the left's frequent accusation of something being a "dog whistle" for something else.

During the cultural revolution, people were persecuted by the metaphors supposedly hidden within their speech. A setting sun? That's code for the downfall of Mao, who was frequently compared to the sun.

No, I don’t think the analogy works.

People have a freedom of who they associate with and do business with:

Boycott is when you decide not to spend your money someplace because you don’t agree with them. You’re exercising your freedom of association.

Cancellation is when a 3rd party demands that a employee/employer sever their relationship because the 3rd party disapproves of the employee. Here, a 3rd party is imposing on two other parties’ freedom of association.

Also, the substance of the speech is quite different:

- “You are wrong, and here are the reasons why” is debate.

- “You are wrong, and you should become unemployable” is cancellation. Cancellation is technically speech, but it is speech that is focused on imposing a high cost on other speech. Talk about the “paradox of intolerance” argument that the modern left loves to use.

Thank you for sharing this. I remember a while back there was a major social justice controversy at Basecamp which started with a senior exec using some insensitive language. An employee then shared the “pyramid of hate” with “biased attitudes” at the bottom and…you guessed it, “genocide” at the top. This annoyed me at the time.

I thought what you described is the perfect antidote to that argument, with “speech policing” at one end and “mob lynching” at the other, or even worse.

Who is the most underprivileged?

1) A Bangladeshi immigrant whose parents entered the US as economic refugees

2) A Uyghur immigrant whose parents entered the US as political refugees

3) A rust-belt white whose family and community was ravaged by the opioid crisis

3) A descendent of black slaves whose parents were economy oppressed by Jim Crow and Redlining

How many "credits" do you give to someone who experienced food insecurity? What about the death of a family member? Do they get bonus points if it was a violent death? If so how much? The more you dig into these subjective measurements, the less it measures the candidate and the more you end up measuring the measurer.

Society cannot find right answer to this kind of question intellectually, instead it can only be determined politically. If we go down this path, the the answer we get will be a reflection who the winning political faction is, and what their prejudices are. Today, it is the hyper race-conscious left against Asian Americans. Yesterday, it was white elites against Jews. Tomorrow, who knows?

I agree that GPAs, SATs, and economic hardship are imperfect measures of merit. But what's important is that they are systems that can be interrogated for their inner workings. You can arrive at a decent understanding of how and what is being measured. However, the act of "privilege measurement" is so muddy as to be an enormous invitation for prejudice to seep in.

The comparison to "cancelling" is coming up a lot, but I think this is a reasonably simple way to distinguish the two:

Employment requires sustained two-way consent. An employer should not have to pay someone money only to have that person make their lives more difficult than otherwise. Just as an employee should be free to quit a company whose goals they find disagreeable.

Cancelling is when a 3rd party comes into an otherwise consensual employer-employee relationship (or publisher-author relationship, really any business relationship) and demanding that to end.

Because Elden Ring took 4 years to develop, 5 years if you include the DLC release time. You would need to amortize its very front-loaded revenue over those 5 years, because a live-service game like Diablo Immortal would be generating somewhat consistent revenue throughout that entire time.

Let's say ER reaches 20M + 8Mx2 for it's two upcoming DLCs @ $40 each. That's $1.8B lifetime. Pretty amazing! DI would need to make $360M per year to be an equivalent business. So 800k in the first 24 hours is not too far off track to being equivalent.

People are people. They're just worse versions of themselves on the internet, Twitter in particular.

I think Yishan was trying to say that moderation is hard not in a "This requires brilliant minds and hard effort" kind of way, but more in a "This will emotionally deflate you for years" kind of way*

Edit: *especially if you're the public figurehead who will receive tremendous heat for this.

People often contrast loot boxes with Magic the Gathering: "At least you can resell your cards", but this makes it more like gambling, not less! CS:Go has far greater potential for economic harm & fraud--due to resale--than the much hated Star Wars loot boxes.

Yeah I’m with you here.

Would it be reasonable to say that hard work should be rewarded? Well…ones propensity for hard work, it turns out, is highly heritable. Either from your genes or from your upbringing. You didn’t choose your parents, nor did you choose your upbringing. So your propensity for hard work is really just unearned privilege.

Same line of reasoning can be applied with future orientation, or smarts. People don’t deserve the fruits of their intellect, because they didn’t do anything to earn it.

I’m not sure if there is a name for this kind of absurdity, but “Achievement Fatalism” is a nice fit.

Anything other than an objective standardized test is just asking for bias.

Agree. "De-bias" is actually the same thing as bias. The only way to solve bias is to increase accuracy of measurement, not introduce new error terms with a negative sign.