zeno334

The Cornell study she links to doesn't really address whether gender diversity leads to better results. It talks about informational diversity, value diversity, and a bunch of other stuff all rather gender neutral. It also finds that it's informational diversity that seems to have the biggest positive impact. I'm not sure if gender diversity is necessarily that important to info diversity. The first page or so of that study is also fairly interesting in that it references a bunch of other studies which when taken together paint a rather ambiguous picture regarding the positive impact of any kind of diversity.

I don't feel her second point says much about the need for gender diversity either. It seems to me that it's the people who use the internet that actually write this history rather than the people who merely build the architecture. I think it would be far more useful to see gender diversity in online arts, writing, social activism and so on, rather than in the teams who build that blog engine that allows all genders to express their ideas.

I don't see how the last point has anything to do with gender either. If it's technology that will produce most jobs in the future then we should encourage all people to take more training in technology.

I read the article precisely because I was interested in an answer to that why question and also because I was happy to read that she does not think asking this question is offensive (it's often the opposite). I'm not very satisfied with her answer though. I'd appreciate it if someone else could contribute to this discussion.

Do you have a source for that forex claim? I remember reading in one of his books that he was never able to consistently profit from fx trading.

But surely you can't compare a hostile AI which can do unlimited harm due to this lack of constraint to the financial industry can you?

Uhm, well, the financial industry isn't parasitical and evil nor does it have interests that are distant or hostile to human goals. It's just another profit oriented industry that offers services which plenty of entities find valuable enough to pay for.

The financial industry is as evil as any profit oriented industry can be and to single it out as something completely wasteful and parasitic is unreasonable.

Uhm, whatever his other points may be, I can't take him seriously when he lumps all financial institutions together into one group that offers nothing of use.

Sure, you can argue all day against the usefulness of speculative speed trading firms - and even then you'd still have some decent arguments against you - but to argue that financial institution in general offer nothing of use is ludicrous.

Some relevant quotes:

Corporations are at least somewhat constrained by the need to actually provide some service that is useful to people. Exxon provides energy, McDonald’s provides food, etc. The exception to this seems to be the financial industry. These institutions consume vast amounts of wealth and intelligence to essentially no human end. Of all human institutions, these seem the most parasitical and dangerous.

it [the financial system] has interests that are distant or hostile to human goals

So McDonalds is ok because it is at least somewhat restrained by the need to offer a useful good (food) but the financial industry is parasitical and evil and offers nothing of use? Seriously?

The article is poorly phrased no matter what the thinking behind it was. It says your chances of death increase with each gate you pass. If there's no difficulty ramping that's simply not true.

That's like saying your chances of rolling another head after rolling 1000 heads are smaller. They're not. It's still 50/50.

Eventually went ahead and wrote a small chrome extension which injects some css and javascript into IAMA threads to make it easy to switch between the full thread and a simplified Q&A thread. See https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cleanama-for-reddi... if you think you need something of the sort.

In the meantime, the best way to keep up is to go to his profile page and refresh every now and then.