HN user
There is research that suggests highly agreeable people do not do as well e.g. negotiation tactics. What is probably true is that is good to 'appear' agreeable. The same research suggests you are correct about the other 3 traits.
Stock prices are a prediction built on crowdsourced information.
Do you also believe there is no upside in crowdsourced information found in, say, commodities, equities and futures markets?
With some product categories there are independent testing laboratories that do a fairly good job of determining quality. The automotive industry comes to mind.
It seems it's a revealed preference that most people really don't care that much about quality, or there would exist a host of companies like Consumer Reports to meet the demand. Complaining on social media about enshittification and evil corporations does not put skin in the game.
I myself constantly complain about the atrocious quality of most consumer software products, but I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to pay for a subscription to an independent testing report.
EU lawmakers should pass laws to prevent this.
So EU lawmakers should determine the amount member countries collect in tax?
fixed someone else's incompetence
This is basically a full-time job for many senior engineers. It may as well be the job description. Thing is, most of these 'leaders' are not capable hiring competent engineers - as if they're capable of identifying competence. You do not want to end up at one of those organizations - but they are everywhere.
It's interesting to think Microsoft was around back then too, taking approximately 14 years to regain the loss of approximately 58% of their valuation.
In practice, it seems that politics generally takes precedence over problem solving. If you look into the psychology of it, neither politicians nor voters are really incentivized to solve big problems. This is especially true for big problems that will take more than an election cycle to solve.
It seems to me that it would be easy to support an argument that suggests more big problems could be solved if incentives were better aligned toward problem solving and if competent people, not professional politicians, were chosen to solve them.
Maybe I'm autistic, but in this thread is appears that one side is making a rational argument, and the other is an appeal to emotion.
A feeling of a community is not a contract. Complaining about losing that community changes nothing; and I believe that's the point GP is making.
This is just one example that was made public due to the federal case, but there is no doubt that this kind of activity is quite common in corporate America at all levels. https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-netflix-executiv...
A solid understanding of behavioral psychology may make it obvious, but like you mention, one could also just open a newspaper.
we're headed to a world with humans, livestock, and the few species...
It looks more and more like we're headed toward a world where we'll regenerate extinct species in labs; and grow our steaks in meat factories. If we no longer need cattle farms, it's possible we'll vote to preserve more lands.
You might even say that some neurodivergence is an adaptive strategy to quickly identify a potential threat.
Many sapiens like to believe they are good people, but they don't like to to think about what that really means. It seems we are talking about a filter that identifies such people very quickly.
I believe you, and this has been know for decades. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna10928755
The underlying truth here is worse than 'majority of educated are illiterate'. Collectively, we've built these delusions into our culture. Perhaps there is less suffering this way.
I've seen projects that failed, or were killed, likely at least in part due to a culture that encouraged poor quality and tech debt. This is preventable, and for no additional up-front engineering effort or time investment.
Is there something here about the role of (and lack of in this case) deliberate and intentional practice?
Something like 50% of college graduates in the US are considered functionally illiterate, despite an enormous number of opportunities for intentional practice; and despite presumably knowing, at least somewhat, of the benefit of attaining more advanced literacy. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna10928755
When I think of poor drivers, I think their incentives to become a good driver are much higher. After all, their own lives and the lives of their loved ones are at risk.
Some clever business people sees this trend and starts ordering junk...
Similar to lower quality made-for-outlet products produced by major brands. With the bins it seems to approach gambling on some level. Like raffle tickets, except when you lose you also have to dispose of some trash.
I recently overheard a very smart user struggle to find how to mute a group you end up having to search the internet for a recipe as to what place to click to find which flydropping menu
I remember when software was supposed to remove pain points in my life, but now I'm not so sure. I often contemplate whether switching from Spotify to the CD player in my car will save me time, but I'm fairly certain it will save me aggravation.
Using the same logic you might say that people shouldn't be allowed to drive until they are 24. Statistically far more lives would have been saved yesterday if we'd only simply restrict more liberties based on age alone.
The theory is that there may be civilizations, or remnants (AIs), that have a vested interest in removing possible competition for resources, or in the case of the AIs, have been instructed to snuff out signs of life for the same reason.
I was referencing something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.L.A._Schechter_Poultry_Corp....
I think the 70's gas rationing in the US was another example of where price controls absolutely stomped on consumers.
I'm not sure if there are any examples to the contrary, but there are surely people who benefit as, say, 'winning' a rent controlled apartment (but I wouldn't necessarily consider that those people were ever actually consumers in the market to begin with).
Have price controls ever ended with a positive outcome for consumers, or anyone for that matter?
but that hasn't been proven at all.
Do you know of anything that provides a strong rebuttal to the research found in documents like this? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3228640/
no intellectual challenge
I tend to think that cargo cult programming and resume-driven development are the intellectual path of least resistance. Perhaps it's analogous to, "I'd rather rewrite this than understand how it works", because that requires less intellectual effort. Quality engineering is not achieved by the intellectually lazy, from what I've seen.
Society is already structured to handle a population where approximately 50% of adults cannot read beyond the 6th grade level. For all the hemming and hawing and throwing money at education, it might be the best we ever get. I'd venture that our society would continue to operate just fine if that number went up to 75% of the population, considering the pareto rule about the percentage of workers who are actually productive and so on.
I also don't have an absolute opinion, but the math of the simulation hypothesis does appear to check out and it's not difficult to believe, scientifically, that intelligences dramatically superior to human-level are possible.
(1) is likely achievable if we gain a better understanding of biology and the human nervous system, which seems likely given a timeline of continuous scientific progress. (2) is even easier for me to grasp as we already know how much energy the human brain uses and we have billions of them now. So far we're not aware of any serious show stoppers for this scenario, but we might be talking timelines of 100's of years.
I don't think there is an obvious correlation or obvious absence of correlation. In some sense, it's heuristics all the way down; but where one might see an obvious correlation, the one who is applying critical thinking sees only a possible correlation.
The idea that someone who is a good singer would also be a good dancer is a non-starter for someone applying critical thinking, in my opinion.
Do you have any other examples where you think critical thinking abilities cannot be universally applied?
I think gas and parking are good examples. If your truck has had 30% less fuel efficiency than a car, then you're going to spend 30% more of your time at the gas pump, huffing fumes, than a car owner for exactly the same outcome in terms of utilization.
Parking is similar. I can fit a small 2-door car into x% more parking spots in a city than a larger truck. So you can spend x% more of your time looking for parking spots. Maybe you're still looking for a spot when the car owner has already completed the errand.
As someone else mentioned, this friction is amortized over time so for some the psychological cost is lower, but for those who understand the principle of opportunity cost, it is a very real and tangible cost of ownership.
Aren't you completely discounting the friction inherent in ownership of a vehicle? Humans tend to find clever ways to justify their irrational decisions, but there is absolutely more friction involved in owning a large truck that is used to haul cargo once a year versus having the same cargo delivered once a year.
That's not how I define critical thinking at all. Blind adherence to Marxism, Taoism or any other ideology is the antithesis of critical thinking.
Science is not like these things, and I believe that Marxists and Taoists would also consider science as separate from the ideologies they espouse. I honestly don't know how someone could be simultaneously scientifically illiterate and capable of critical thinking.