Are there people out there not experiencing time pressure right now? In which industry? Feel like we’re at an all-time high for pressure on white collar workers to deliver more and faster.

Based on this paragraph, I think we are in agreement?

My point is basically that conservative leadership, both within and outside of the military, has sought (and implemented!) simple solutions to complex problems that end up backfiring immensely. In this case, the problem is “enemy country bad”, and the solution is “bomb them submission”. I’m not sure we need to go into details on how that’s a terrible idea?

That’s not to say that liberals don’t put forth simple solutions to complex problems, it’s just that conservatives have successfully implemented obstructionist strategy starting with Newt Gingrich in the 90s, and the closest we’ve come to anything on the national level to liberal policy has been the ACA, which was so hamstrung that it was nearly unrecognizable when compared to the Romneycare it was modeled after. It’s also the stated goal of Project 2025 to roll back nearly all of the progressive policy wins of the Obama and Trump 1 eras (the latter wins coming only via judicial decisions, not executive or legislative).

But I’d also say that there’s an inherent bias to the word “eugenics” fundamentally: the implication that there are objectively good genetics and bad genetics for humans. In the extreme case there are genetic defects that cause stillbirth and put the mother’s life at severe risk, but this is almost never what is meant by usage of the word “eugenics”. Again, to conflate the two concepts is useful only to people who have caused immense human suffering.

Notably, one of the largest "Liberal hawks", LBJ, often disagreed head on with Curtis LeMay because LeMay was too insane in his villainous disregard for human life. LeMay's dehumanization of the citizens of foreign nations was on par with Nazism, imo.

I'll give you that Obama and Biden are a black mark on leftwing politics in terms of aerial bombing as they continued the status quo instead of enacting positive change. But the both-sidesism is a bit too much here.

What's scientifically valid about that? What part of the scientific process is being utilized? What hypothesis is being tested?

If you're implying that people would start to be taller because we are culling short people, then you're talking about "artificial selection", not "eugenics". People who believe that there are groups of humans that are inferior or superior based on genetic differences would love for you to conflate the two concepts because that gets them closer to their political goals that have historically resulted in unimaginable human suffering.

That's called "artificial selection", and people who believe that certain groups of humans are somehow superior or inferior to each other because of differences in genetics would love for you to conflate "artificial selection" and "eugenics".

There's no need to steelman a concept that has caused unimaginable human suffering.

This is a lesson that conservative administrations have refused to learn for decades. I hope Curtis Lemay is experiencing a toasty afterlife for all of the suffering he has caused humanity due to a zealous conviction that aerial bombing campaigns win wars, and his lasting legacy in conservative war strategy.

Anyway, unless you mean conjectures that humans have already posited, or ones that are particularly famous, that list is much shorter, but also contains conjectures that I’m not convinced can be solved before the heat death of the universe using all available compute power. P != NP is a conjecture, for example. Also a lot of prime number conjectures that are extremely computationally expensive.

The credulousness that this administration is granted by devil’s advocates and “rationalists” is exhausting.

In fact, I see quite a bit of shaming that occurs here on HN when someone says something completely out of pocket (in fact, in a way you are shaming both me and the original poster) - but that rarely gets called out by moderators because it’s already accepted as not impolite. I often see shaming when users are outright racist - which to be clear I also agree with the use of shame in that instance.

The moderation is not unbiased in this regard.

I’m glad you brought it up here. Just because someone speaks well, intelligently, pleasantly, or even civilly doesn’t mean their message is righteous or just. Conversely, just because someone creates discomfort or says something impolite doesn’t mean their message can be disregarded. In fact, it’s those that are in power that often decide what or what is not impolite, and even speaking truth or justice to power in the first place can be labeled as impolite. George Carlin’s primary message as a comedian was essentially that.

Do you have alternative suggestions, or will you stick to simply discouraging the use of shame on this forum?

Humans use shame to correct antisocial behavior, and humans feel shame in order to avoid antisocial behavior. The technology professions are rife with antisocial behavior. Our leaders are chosen and their behavior is optimized as antisocial, for shareholder (and personal) short-term growth.

> Weapons, of course, cut both ways; Ukraine is pushing back against an aggressor by using weapons, long range sensing, passive radar, etc.

This is an entirely different subject that I don’t think we should get sidetracked by. I’ll just recommend Die Physiker (or one of its translations) as a fun starting point for radicalization against the argument you presented.

Devil’s advocate, it sounds like the accused could be part of some mutual aid networks who could be helping people who are vulnerable against the actions of the current government. People who may die if they’re deported, or returned to their family (gay or trans youth). This person may literally have saved lives by not handing over their phonebook and messages.

Mmm, this I disagree with particularly. I view HN as a forum dedicated to the technology professions, and as such, it’s an extremely appropriate place to shame those in the profession who refuse to consider the second-order effects of their work.

We (those in the technology profession) have no union through which we can encourage professional standards and ethics and codes of conduct. Shame is pretty much the only and last bastion for those of us who care about how we make our money, and not just the amount written on the paycheck.

I know there are some people, both in this forum, and who I’ve met in person - (“Raytheon? How do you feel about the moral dilemma of working for a weapons manufacturer?” … “We manufacture weapons? I just work in HR.”) - who will never lose an ounce of sleep considering their line of work due to an underdeveloped sense of ethics.

But there are some people who are in the middle ground who can still be won over. Every year that passes it becomes more important that technologists are aware of the ethical implications of their work - no matter how much capital incentivizes the opposite. Don’t let a paycheck delude you.

Type B: “directionally correct” ML inferences that provide value by virtue of outputting an inference regardless of its accuracy. The value comes from providing automated decision that allows someone or something to move forward in a process, similar to management consultants. This is used heavily in ad tech and (social) media algorithms. I would even put gambling and investing inferences in this bucket as the accuracy of algorithms isn’t really required to be that high to provide alpha.

Type A: ML inferences that are creating or replacing systems where high accuracy is table stakes. This is applications in industrial engineering, chemical engineering, biotechnology, etc. If you can’t beat any existing automated or non-automated systems in terms of accuracy, your product is dead in the water. You can make it a few years by faking it but eventually the pied piper makes his call, and a major contract falls through. This has always been the lifecycle of products I’ve been on. It’s an incredibly difficult problem. “Faking it” here means piling on heuristics upon heuristics to convince someone to sign a contract, even if the underlying precision-recall tradeoff curve isn’t financially viable. This is the basis for the conversations between myself and my colleagues that a model that can’t provide actionable insights without a wall of heuristics / post-processing is a red flag for a product.

Anyway, that generalizes to LLMs because LLMs can provide so much value in the Type B category, but anyone promising Type A products based on LLM technology is treading on thin ice, imo.

Edit: also, as an aside, feature extraction and post-processing of inferences is necessary for any model, but if that code becomes bloated is when I lose confidence in the model’s ability to provide inference value.

There’s a classic stack overflow from a decade ago that I remember where a ML engineer / DS was asking if a linear regression model trained on sorted data (X, Y sorted independently) had any inference value. They asked because their manager insisted that was the correct way to do it because it minimized training error. Well, duh. Two sorted lists of values are maximally correlated.

This is an extreme example of what I mean by “preprocessing data”.

An extreme example of “postprocessing results” would be to create a decision tree based on the output of a decision tree algorithm that re-sorts values into something that is palatable for the customer, based on feedback from the customer on a case-by-case basis. “Hey this was a false positive…” -> add an “if” statement to the postprocessing.

Counter-counter argument, it doesn’t actually matter what the proportion is, rather the perception of it. The likelihood of non-white collar crime affecting your life has dropped dramatically in all of our lifetimes. The chance of being affected by white collar crime has skyrocketed - who hasn’t been solicited for a class action lawsuit?

Which leads me to my hotter take: America isn’t turning into a low trust society because of crime and brown people (white replacement theory), it’s turning into a low trust society because of white collar crime, grifting, private equity takeovers, naked corruption, prosperity gospel, fuck-you got-mine, exurban development, oversized car culture, etc etc etc.

Edit: furthermore, it’s in these psychopathic fuckrats best interest that people believe that there is a “1% bad apple” phenomenon to justify their domestic security panopticon, and they would be laughing all the way to the bank that there are so many suckers who buy into their propaganda if they weren’t so high from huffing their own ketamine, cocaine, adderall, and HGH-laced farts that they believe their own bull shit.

It’s like blockchain but for racism, and it’s genius.