throwawaygh

Citation sorely needed. What’s the name of that opportunity fund?

It’s about who owned the land in 2017 and who was governor. Some states were less corrupt than others, but as a general rule OZs were and are mostly political grift with a few legit trades thrown in for cover.

The reason that HUGE tracts of OZs make no sense is that the “for development of blighted areas” thing is very thinly veiled bullshit.

Governors. Many tracts were selected as political favors to donors to developers who already owned significant acreage in the OZ.

In many states OZs were selected as political handouts and were placed in areas where development was already planned. The characterization that they lifted up poor regions is pure horseshit.

A two earner household with a cop and a nurse benefited from SALT.

The average beneficiary of opportunity zones is generationally wealthy. A pair of tech workers pulling down 7 figures a year are stupidly wealthy and still would probably not have enough capital to be the primary beneficiary of an opportunity fund.

I’m not going to defend the salt deduction because I’m not a fan of it for the reasons you mention, but comparing SALT to opportunity zones is genuinely delusional.

Pitting the lower middle class against the upper middle class over a modestly regressive tax break while folks who haven’t worked in three generations pay a 0% tax rate on the fruits of others’ labor.

It adds insult to injury that a billionaire real estate mogul made EXACTLY this argument when selling his tax policy and business conduct (I’m just being a good businessman, and I’ll fix the rigged system by getting rid of loopholes!), then turned around and got rid of special deductions for normal folks and created a massive special interest handout for real estate moguls.

Anyone can read the source code, or (more accessibly) the docs and get a pretty good understanding of how it works.

I really hope this argument is made in court.

it's hard to imagine most US presidents deriving joy from music

They're people, not gods. People like music.

This was a fairer take when there weren't elected officials and sports stars hyping crypto.

It's not 2008 or even 2013. You can get crypto at a coin counting kiosk in any grocery store in middle America.

The psychology driving crypto for the last half decade or so is the same sort of psychology that drives penny stocks and scratch-offs. The only people who don't understand this yet are sitting in SV/NYC/Miami and are totally out of touch.

Stablecoins were sold as "the stability of a savings account with the returns of dogecoin".

>> UST loses peg

> There's a certain delight [1] in watching increased market volatility exposing how understanding merkle trees and consensus protocols doesn't make you an expert on what the financial system is, how it works and why it is the way it is.

These comments don't seem very relevant to stablecoins such as this one, which are algorithmic rather than backed

Just... muah. Perfecto.

This seems to be mostly false, in the sense that many schools run huge class sizes for many core courses (cough couch Berkely) and in practice non-TA instruction

Berkeley is not a good counter-example.

There are usually several teaching professors doing a full time job behind the scenes -- handling a myriad of student crises, handling a huge quantity of special accommodations, plagiarism and other academic misconduct, behavior issues (on the part of both students and staff!!!), constant question bank maintenance, constant schedule tweaking, interfacing with faculty demands from down-stream courses, and so on. Those are all trivial, though. Most important -- by far -- is training and managing a large course staff most of whom have never taught a recitation or graded a homework assignment!

Scaling up from a class of 1 instructor and 40 students (at Olin 20 or 15 I'd guess?) in one class to class with 40 staff members and 1000+ students and several lecturers is its own skillset. Those instructors are not teachers. They are mid-level managers. It's a different job, and not one that most undergraduates are prepared to take on.

And the face that it's a machine matters. Teaching a few recitations or lab sections and grading homework is not even remotely the same as instructing a course.

It's a bit like saying that you don't need experienced management at a logistics company because, after all, everyone learns how to do the warehouse job within a week. True, but keeping that machine running requires institutional memory and is itself a full time job. And just because you can train cogs quickly doesn't mean many of those cogs would do a particularly good job at designing and operating the underlying machine. Or even a miniature version of that machine.

but I think you might be underestimating how much better intentionally-designed support resources can make the process.

Having spent time both inside and outside the elite academic institutions, folks who use places like Olin or Berkeley as barometers for "normal" are wildly out of touch with 90+% of the 4,000 colleges and universities in the USA.

Students at places like Olin or Berkeley are already the cream of the cream of the crop. At Olin or Berkeley you have a handful of good student-educators every year. At normal places the acceptance rate is closer to Olin's reject rate, and the applicant pool is way lower quality. At normal places an above average Olin kid comes around once a decade or less, and the annual cream of the crop at Olin or Berkeley simply never pass through.

so yes some problems are best solved by government, but innovation isnt one of them.

1. I've worked in gov labs, industry labs, and academic labs. Mostly industry labs. People and culture are the most important thing. The variability in innovation between companies is often WAY higher than the variability between the public and private sector. Gov labs can be insanely innovative or quagmires. Same for industry labs. It's all about the people and culture. Good people and good culture and possible in the public and private sectors. Bad people and bad culture are also possible in the public and private sectors. Anyone telling you otherwise is trolling and/or selling an idiology (sic).

2. The whole point of the above post was that there's ENORMOUS value in the "tried and true". Getting rid of endemic malaria has been possible for the better part of a century. It's a governance problem, not an innovation problem.

This is exactly right. In huge swaths of the US, your local county's Mosquito Control department is probably a small number of full timers (maybe one or even zero), some budget for seasonal staff, and some commercial F-150s with sprayers in the bed. They probably have six-seven figures a year in budget.

They don't have a PR budget, just trucks and sprayers. But they are absolutely the reason that there isn't endemic malaria in your county.

Professors command high salaries

I guess it depends on what you mean by "high". At most institutions, faculty will make $50K-$60K starting, max out at $100K, and often do not have access to a pension. In many states, you're really better off, financially, as a high school teacher or police officer.

Which, I mean, high school teachers are highly paid by some standards. But saying professors command high salaries on a tech forum where even new grads are probably making more than the average full professor is probably misleading.

but with proper resources and support students can also be very effective instructors... better than professor-taught classes

1. It really depends on the course; undergrad-lead core courses tend to be a disaster.

2. On that note, there's an important confounding factor: undergraduate-lead courses are often "topics" courses outside of the core curriculum, which naturally attract better feedback than "broccoli and spinach" courses regardless of the instructor. E.g., in CS, a course on game design or crypto will always attract higher ratings than "core" courses like Data Structures or especially Intro Programing.

3. Good faculty do a lot more than teach. And I don't even mean research. Industry relations and job placement are huge value adds of a good faculty member.

There's an important split between courses that need careful pedagogy and courses that really just need engagement. For an intro programming course serving all students, you really need a professional educator who is practiced at going through the slog of helping people understand for loops. Sometimes an undergrad will pass through who could totally teach the course, but that tends to be an exceptional student.

Once you have a bunch of juniors/seniors who know how to program, and assuming you're teaching a course that's primarily about applied programming (eg, not a proof-based CS Theory or Algo course), engagement becomes more important than pedagogy.

Student-lead courses can be great, and ARE often way better than prof-lead courses especially for "applied programming" type courses, but it's probably not feasible to run core major requirements with undergraduate instructors as a steady-state.

Have you ever managed an intern? Inexperienced labor often has negative value-add.

Make the business students hash out contracts with vendors

A second semester senior without a job lined up negotiating a seven figure contract... what could go wrong?

IT students handle the networking

This is already a thing at most colleges.

mechanical engineers the boilers

Might be possible, but could also be a disaster.

hospitality management majors dorm maintenance

Students already do work in dorms at front desks and so on. Business majors aren't qualified to do plumbing, electrical, etc.

Students who are qualified to do plumbing and electrical are probably better off selling that labor on the open market.

At the end of the day, the other basic problem is that at most colleges, most college students who need work can get better-paying work than the sort of work that's available on campus. Why work in Uni IT over the summer if you can get an internship literally anywhere else that probably pays better and could become a full time job?

The vast majority of Christian Church-affiliated colleges in the USA are either catholic (Jesuit in particular) or Mainline. In both of those cases, the denominational ties do not preclude attendance at the college/university by non-Christians, LGBT, etc. Either in policy or in practice. If a university is Catholic or Mainline, it's pretty safe to assume that the college is open to all and that a huge % of students attending the school are not from that denomination (or particularly theistic).

Places like Wheaton (Chicago), Cedarville, Liberty, CofO, etc. are very much the outliers in terms of how church-affiliated higher ed institutions behave toward non-fundamentalist-conservative-Christians.

BTW, being Christian is not enough at CofO. The important thing is to be socially conservative and fit in with the fundy crowd. Mainline lutherans, for example, definitely aren't welcome. The national-ethnic-religious-political belief complex that is de facto required to get by at CofO is probably not even recognizable as Christianity to a European Christian eye.

Anyways, with respect to CofO, the bigotry is really not even relevant. Compare the CS faculty at Truman/Rolla/etc. vs CofO. The work study program is a $20/hr job for 15 hours a week. You can get up to $15/hr easy and your improved internship placements out of Truman/Rolla will put you ahead of CofO even before graduation. Ten years down the road there's probably close to an entire 0 in outcome differences.

I am from Missouri and still provide a lot of advice to first gen college folks in that region.

I don't know anything about Berea, but I cannot recommend College of the Ozarks.

I can't be more clear: this is a submarine about a terrible college that no one should attend.

First, and most importantly, College of the Ozarks generally has a really terrible educational product. Really, TERRIBLE. It's difficult to over-state how bad the educational product is. Go look at their CS faculty. Almost all community colleges have way better faculty, to say nothing of other four year colleges.

Second, the work program is generous but not amazing. It's an $11K tuition waiver, which comes out to 15 hour/week job at $20/hour. Room and board is expensive, and off-campus living isn't as cheap as other options in Missouri.

Third, for students in Missouri, Truman State is an infinitely better product at roughly the same price point ($12K, and no one is stopping you from getting a part time job on or off campus...). It's a "public LAC" so the product is in the same category, but infinitely better.

Especially in CS, students are MUCH better off going to Truman State and working part-time. They'll make up the (SMALL) difference in part time job earnings through a combination of lower living expenses and way better internship placements. I'd be astounded if the average Truman CS student doesn't come out financially ahead of the average CofO student at graduation, and will eat my shoe if the Truman CS student isn't better off after 1 year of work.

Fourth, better not be homosexual or you'll be expelled / forced out. Always worth mentioning because many students don't realize this until too late.

But, again, I cannot overstate how bad of a deal CofO is compared to state schools (Truman, UMSL, Rolla) for Missouri residents, especially in high-demand fields like CS. The cost isn't that dissimilar and the faculty and educational quality at the state schools are infinitely better. I mean, go compare the CS faculty. Truman and UMSL have real CS programs staffed by real CS faculty. Rolla is a proper research university. CofO, on the other hand, has one faculty member whose industry experience is closer to "IT" than "SWE" and their curriculum is out-gunned by most community colleges. Honestly better off getting industry certs through a community college program.

I'm a proponent of affordable open access. I think that work produced using even a penny of federal grant money should only be published in open access venues where publication fees (including eg mandatory conference attendance) are capped at $500. (In particular, these means a permanent remote attendance option at all CS conference... no more "good work doesn't get published because the author is at a community college and can't afford a one week European beach resort vacation".)

The opinion expressed in the parent comment is (perhaps unwittingly) extreme and doesn't even solve the problem.

First, the "no paywalls" solution does not even solve the problem! What happens in practice is that publishers shift the cost from the reader to the author by charging MASSIVE open access fees to publish. The taxpayer gets screwed by the publisher on the front-end instead of the back-end. Any solution needs hard upper limits on the cost of publishing.

Second, open access requirements should be scoped to work paid for with public funds. Professors should be allowed to write books and publish them through the university press as long as they do the work on their own time (or the university's time). Graduate students should be allowed to do off-hours consulting work to make ends meet during their PhD studies.

the privilege is being able to get a salary without caring about his activity that adds the most value for society... working most of your time documenting why you should get a promotion... But it's one of the many very real problems academia has nowadays.

There are 4,000 colleges and universities in the US. At the VAST majority of those institutions -- perhaps 80% -- professors spend 40 hours per week teaching courses. They teach 3 university courses per semester with 40-400 students per course, with the lower enrollment courses requiring a pretty heavy lift per student (lots of office hours, labor-intensive grading of proofs or long papers or large programs, etc). That's 40 hours of work, sometimes more.

Hacker news massively over-estimates the number of "elite R1 faculty" and under-estimates the number of faculty who are essentially just college teachers.

"First, they don't" is the top-most answer.

Also, the multiple is closer to 10x for strong faculty candidates if we're talking about teaching-focused roles. A lower-tier college/university (non phd granting) will offer 60K - 80K for a full-time faculty position. A PhD with 5-10 years of industry experience will make >500K if they are maximizing for income.

paper mill incentives

In the USA, publishing a large number of low-quality papers is at best unhelpful for getting grants. It's probably (very!) harmful.

funding commitees will want some kind of metric for "non-technical" people.

The stakeholders within funding agencies are always technical. The external stakeholders -- congressional staff and corporate executives -- could not care less about citations/paper counts.

Based on your view of how these things work, I'm a bit curious about your background here. Have you sat on a funding committee for a public funding agency? Do you know the names of any program directors? Have you served on an academic grant review committee for your employer? If so, I'm really curious to know what field you're in, since things appear to work quite differently there.

1. At least in CS, the role of a PhD is typically different. There are many groups in industry where entire orgs up to SVP are PhDs, and those groups are growing quickly. Hell, consider IBM Research, where thousands of folks have their entire management chain as CS PhDs all the way up to the CEO who has a CS PhD! The work done by PhDs in industry is different from the work done by people with bachelors/masters, even when they sit in the same group. This isn't true for everyone, but it's true for a lot people.

2. "you'll work with people who don't have phds" is also true in Academia. R1 faculty are research group managers. Almost none of their direct reports have PhDs.

First, they don't. There's a HUGE CS faculty shortage. CS faculty positions outside of R1 are insanely hard to fill and the average quality of faculty tends to be quite low. Some lower tier colleges and universities will hire tenure track faculty out of online masters programs with no teaching experience. Even then, faculty searches regularly fail. The bar is rock bottom. (This isn't meant as a bias against online programs; the salient point is that if your masters was online then you almost certainly have zero in-person teaching experience even as a TA.)

Second, most people aren't rational economic actors and even those who are have a myriad of objective functions.

Some common reasons people stay when they could get much higher paying and lower stress jobs:

1. Immigration.

2. Work life balance. Not unique to academia, btw. I know ex-FAANG SWEs who make $70K/yr because they can get the job done in one or two days a week from a van and want to spend most of their life in the mountains.

3. Immigration.

4. Some people actually enjoy teaching and view it as a life calling.

5. Immigration.

6. Ageism. A 50 year old who spent 20 years in academia is going to have a hard time getting back into industry.

That's just another popularity contest with all of the exact same perverse incentives. How do you think people get on conference committees / journal boards?

We should stop worrying about popularity contests (citation counts, prestige-signalling conference committees/paper venues, etc.).

When we decide whether to retain an academic as a visiting scientist, consultant, etc., I am always the voice in the room encouraging folks to disregard everything except for one question: after having read 3 or 4 of this person's most relevant papers, do we think they can help us with the specific problems we face?

When I sit on grant review committees I ignore all the academic prestige shit and ask: is this a real 10-15-30 year problem for a field, does that field matter to the funding agency's objectives, and does the description of the plan of attack have a good chance of success? I don't need to evaluate popularity contests to answer those questions.

Popularity contests are low-effort short-cuts for the low-brow scientist/program manager. Best to ignore them if you have real problems and need real solutions.

Economically it is infeasible to politically play, social engineer, or bribe thousands of reviewers in a publicly inspectable web of trust.

You're replacing peer review with a social media following. A large social media following is absolutely something you can buy.

Which, by the way, has already happened. The easiest way to get an R1 job is to build a large twitter following. Getting a top 5 CS position without at least a few thousand twitter followers is basically impossible these days. High-prestige academia is just a high-brow social media influencer these days.

None of this is meant as a defense of the old system, btw.

A tenured professor is still a highly respected position

I don't think this is true outside of the (tiny) academic bubble.

Being a tenured professor at a well-ranked R1 has some prestige within a limited community. However, most tenured faculty -- even Full Professors -- are not at R1s.

Consider the following 5 facts about non-R1 faculty:

1. Compensation. At most institutions -- even in CS -- salaries max out at $100K. It's not uncommon for a CS professor with 30 years of experience to make less than a high school mathematics teacher, especially if the former is at a private university and the latter is at a public school in a state with a strong pension system. It's extremely common for CS professors to make less than new grads at FAANG.

2. External Opportunities. A non-R1 professor will have a difficult time trying to be a consultant, expert witness, etc. Also, raising grant money is basically impossible.

3. Job Autonomy. At most institutions -- even in CS -- the average faculty member spends most of their time teaching. They are, for the most part, treated as replaceable cogs.

4. Job Security. Tenure doesn't mean what it used to mean, and it never meant "perfect job security". During COVID, many universities laid off tenured faculty.

5. Even WITHIN academia, faculty at R2 or LACs are taken less seriously. Outside of academia, faculty are essentially viewed as "teachers" (and that view, again, isn't exactly inaccurate outside of R1).

On the whole, in the vast majority of cases, being a professor is lower status than being a software engineer. You don't get paid well, you spend 40 hours a week teaching, and then folks WITH PHDs who know how the business works claim that you have undue privilege because you don't someone find another 40 hours a week to do world-changing research for which you are not compensated and for which you will not reap any reward.

Your understanding of the mask cases is incorrect.

There is no "right not to mask". A right not to mask would mean that such a law would not be enforceable. But the court found no such right. It simply found that the executive was interpreting a statute incorrectly.

Specifically, the Biden administration believed that a piece of legislation gave them the authority to mandate masks in certain workplaces. The court disagreed except for in the case of medical facilities. In particular, the court said nothing about what would happen if, hypothetically, Congress were to pass a law clarifying that OSHA does indeed have the authority to mandate masking.

The SCOTUS decisions regarding masking/vaccines were not cases of constitutional law or individual rights. Rather, SCOTUS was simply ruling on the meaning of a statute passed by the legislature and enforced by the executive. Individual constitutional rights were not in play.

By contrast, Roe v Wade establishes a constitutional right to abortion. What this means is that even if Congress or a state passed a law outlawing abortion, that law would not be enforceable unless SCOTUS overturned Roe.

I don't think there is a single justice on the court who believes that the constitution provides a right not to mask. The court is hopelessly political, and on hot-button issues it's best to think about the court reasoning backward from decisions rather than forward for law, but "a constitutional right not to mask" is not how the conservative justices currently on the court would ever go about justifying striking down a mask policy.

Comparing the mask/vaccine decisions to the Roe decision doesn't make much sense.

> the court believes an individual has right to decide whether they can wear a mask

They ruled that the government doesn't have the right to force people to wear masks.

Both of these statements are super false.

The court ruled that one particular piece of legislation does not give the executive branch the authority to force certain employers to have and enforce a rule that their employees, while in the workplace, must be masked or vaccinated.

There is NO "individual right to not mask" involved here. It's a ruling about the authority of the executive branch given the contents of a law passed by the legislature. That's all.

In particular,

1. The businesses effected by the ruling are of course free to none-the-less mandate masking without a federal mandate. I.e., there is no right for individuals not to mask.

2. If Congress were to pass a new law explicitly giving OSHA authority to mandate masks in workplaces, the court's reasoning in Nat'l Federation of Businesses v. DoL would be wholly irrelevant to that new piece of legislation.

3. Mask mandates in non-OSHA contexts -- eg federal buildings -- are not effected by either scotus ruling.

4. Biden v Missouri, decided by the same court at the same time, left vaccine mandates in place for healthcare facilities.

Neither of the SCOTUS decisions have anything to do with masking as an individual right, and they certainly don't rule that "government doesn't have the right to force people to wear masks". All they say is that one particular law, as written, doesn't give the Executive the authority to mandate that employers mandate masks/vaccines in certain workplaces.

If the court had found a reading of the constitution that enshrined a right not to mask that somehow didn't create a penumbra within which many other individual rights (including abortion) lived, that would be... a rather incredible exercise in bullshitting. But that's not what happened.

Regardless, other comments here are accurate: at least on certain issues the supreme court is hopelessly politicized.

I wonder if you've had an in-person conversation with someone who would identify as being a part of the AGI safety community.

Yes. Many.

I've talked with several people and their arguments are a lot more sophisticated than an intuition that ML models would have human motivations.

I don't have to think much about refuting this. Sure, okay, sophistication. Or not. Whatever. The sophistication is still mostly philosophical. To wit:

I wonder if you also believe that post is just a wasteful collection of philosophy anthropomorphizing misunderstood ML models.

Yes, it's mostly philosophy and not of much use for understanding how engineered systems behave. I design ML systems and think about their safety. Even in the limit, where ML sysetems do some non-trivial set of human-like tasks (which we aren't even remotely close to yet, btw), how is this essay supposed to be useful to me when I design safety analyses?

I liken it to Software Architects who address software security by talking about Christopher Alexander instead of, y'know, building languages that obviate buffer overflows or establishing frameworks/code practices that make injection attacks less common.