It's no fable. Some of us don't have what it takes to start their own company, that's true.

Probably there is no hope for some. I don't know how you'd show that there is a system that doesn't suffer from this problem. I mean, you'd have to show that even with less incentive to produce and more demand for products (since everyone is owed "decent living" or whatever it's called nowadays), there is no possibility for demand to exceed production.

Companies do close down all the time because expenses are higher than revenues. Restaurants are a very well-known industry where that is super common (and it's not because restaurants tend to pay exhorbitant wages). It's literally a meme to accountants that having a restaurant as a client is a good way to never get paid (they may close down in the 30 days after delivery they are typically given to pay you).

Also, in a way, we already "shut down" companies that pay too little: you just can't even offer to pay someone 2$/hour. The question I'd ask is "who would take that job if it were allowed?"

In essence, having low wage jobs should never be an issue: if you're of the opinion that these companies shouldn't exist in the first place, you're essentially saying that those workers have better options already available. Do we really need to fire them to get them to go for those?

In other words, do judges perform better than COMPAS? And slightly less important: is the variance lower?

If it isn't, then there is no point arguing whether COMPAS is risky: it would be less so than the alternative.

Although I suppose that the 'crowd of non-experts' is essentially what a jury is and they had about the same performance.

At any rate, it sounds like much less of a hassle to input characteristics into COMPAS and get a probability than getting a jury together.

Besides, I think I'd be much more worried that a jury could influence each other and bias its decision than about am algorithm making unfair predictions.

How insane would the password rules have to be for anyone to travel 1 hour more to go to a different university? How insane for them to stop playing a given video game? To change banking institutions?

I don't have the answer for others, but for me, the answer to all of those is "pretty insane". Except for the banking case, password security is a minor concern (and even then, the system protects us with anti-fraud laws and what not).

In a sense, the market is sorting itself out: it just decided that it doesn't care much about passwords. In fact, if you figure out a way to be profitable while offering twice the interest rate but every time people log in to your bank they have to dance the robot or whatever, you'd probably still have customers.

I think this is partly true. But then, a similar interpretation of "pro-affirmative action" is that one believes that whatever bad thing happens to a minority is never their fault.

I think both are only partly true.

The problem with affirmative action is that it (I don't know if it's always the case, but it seems to be often so) specifically considers minority status. It is obvious, I think, that this is not the kind of criteria a computer, say, would consider if it were to look only for the most qualified applicants.

On the other hand, you or someone else in the thread made a good point: this pro-minority bias can be seen as an effort to counter the systematic bias against "outgroups".

The problem is that I don't think we know the effect size of each of those: how strong is this systematic bias? In a protected status agnostic society, would all professional fields perfectly mirror population rates?

I don't think so. We know there are metal disorders/illnesses that impact cognitive functions (Down's syndrome) and obviously genetics is partly responsible (do Down syndromers have similar rates of Down syndrome babies?). Similarly, I don't think the success of Asians and Jews is due to some form of societal bias in their favor.

In the end, the question is whether the anti-bias bias is correcting towards 0 or in the other direction (i.e.: protected status is very important, just the other way).

I don't know what the answer to this one is.

The people out there who drive drunk or without insurance aren't doing it with the intent of killing people or not having to pay for their damages: they're doing it because they "didn't think about it".

Hanlon's razor tells us that a similar phenomenon is at play in many "bad interview questions".

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

In this case, the title was misleading, but genetic heritage does impact cognitive ability, otherwise we'd have no cognitive advantage over our Great Ape distant cousins.

In practice this attitude makes you pro-coal (but not in a dogmatic way).

In the real world, waiting for things to improve before pulling the trigger means using what's currently used until then. That has costs.

What's the energy source that's most dangerous? The common sense answer is nuclear (probably because of nuclear bombs first, Chernobyl second). Some clever people might argue about coal given its high emission output.

But at least by death count, the winner is clearly hydro power. Mostly due to the Banqiao Dam incident [1] which directly killed 26,000 people and indirectly killed 145,000.

Of course, that incident is a mess of stupid decision after stupid decision and some might want to claim that it's an outlier. To that I will reply that the same can be said of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima (as well as every other hydro incident[2]).

The fact is that the world is full of stupid. I predict that in the future there will be some solar power company that figures out how to kill a bunch of people with a battery fire. And yet, that won't change anything to my support of hydropower or solar power. Nuclear safety is a minor issue compared to its advantages over coal and other fossil fuels.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_...

I once had a nasty file system corruption due to disconnecting the power cord that corrupted my (local) git repo and almost made me lose a day of work. Even with source control there are risks.

If there is anything positive to take away from this,it should be to learn to consider risk management.

If you write code even, say, once every week and haven't yet bothered to learn how to use source control, you owe it to your mental sanity to do it now.

EDIT: archived http://web.archive.org/web/20170818080940/http://cc.bingj.co...

Passing a law against ICE cars does not prove electric cars superior, the same way passing a law against EVs does not prove ICEs superior.

However, if I am guessing correctly, your point of view is that gender stereotypes have no factual basis and exist only due to a cultural pressure. If that assumption is true, then there is a sense in which what you said is true: by disallowing the cultural pressure, the stereotypes and therefore their evidential basis would disappear.

Whether the assumption is true or not, I agree that an "anti-speech" organizational rule is not physical violence, which is the conventional definition I would use. I hesitate to say it is not 'violence', because people like the WHO define the word much more expansively[1].

From that, 2 things: first, I think the experimental evidence is hard to explain under the assumption above, like the fact that more progressive countries like my own Canada or Sweden have high gender occupational differences, but countries doing very poorly on equality metrics quite lower differences there[2]:

> The least sexist countries I can think of – Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, etc – all have somewhere around the same number (30%, 20%, and 24%, respectively). The most sexist countries do extremely well on this metric! The highest numbers on the chart are all from non-Western, non-First-World countries that do middling-to-poor on the Gender Development Index: Thailand with 55%, Guyana with 54%, Malaysia with 51%, Iran with 41%, Zimbabwe with 41%, and Mexico with 39%.

Second, while I have no doubt you're right that Google is being equated with the gulag quite literally by some, I think there is a sense in which one can talk about a weak commonality between both. In this case, the link being a form of 'violence' (WHO definition) against saying certain things. I can understand why this is a quite upsetting similarity if one were on the other side of it, particularly when people abuse it. I wish there was a way to sort of get reasonable to call out people "on their side" when they do that.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence

[2] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

That's one point of view. Another might argue that MLK sent a letter from a certain jail in Birmingham rather than oppose the arrest, say. Yet another might invoke Gandhi or Mandela.

Is civil disobedience a form of force? Yes, I suppose it is one of the possible meanings of 'force'.

However, if that is what you mean, then how is this opposed to being polite and understanding?

Compare your statement of "dragging people kicking and screaming" to MLK's attitude[1]:

> The decision prompted King to write, in a statement, that though he believed the Supreme Court decision set a dangerous precedent, he would accept the consequences willingly. "Our purpose when practicing civil disobedience is to call attention to the injustice or to an unjust law which we seek to change," he wrote—and going to jail, and eloquently explaining why, would do just that.

Or even to Lincoln's[2] (who wrote this at a time when victory in the war was pretty certain):

> With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Your error is in assuming that being polite and understanding means you are to apply exactly no pressure of any kind in furthering your goals. It is not so. Non-violent protest and even self-defense can be done either politely just as well as adversarially. If you ask me, Lincoln waged war yet was more understanding of his enemies than many civil protesters are today.

[1] http://time.com/3773914/mlk-birmingham-jail/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln%27s_second_ina...

On the one hand, I think there's a lack of understanding from people like the author that there are people who want sex. I wouldn't call it a need (although if 'respect' and 'goal-realization' are needs, then sex is without a doubt: it's literally on a lower and more basic level on Maslow's pyramid).

And there's certainly a point in saying that an investor (investing their own money, not the fund they're managing) is within their right to refuse to fund a business if they don't like the founder's personality or whatever other subjective characteristic.

On the other hand, I see the point the author is making that it sucks to have so many people focused on this one thing irrespective of anything to do with the business.

It seems to me that the conflict is one of opposing values/needs. If (some) men want to flirt and have sex with every woman and this conflicts with the latter's wants for respect and self-actualization, what's the "right" solution?

On the one hand, we could just ask the men to sacrifice their want. On the other hand, we could also ask the women to not take CEO roles. When one thinks about the negative aspects of each possibility, the choice is not as easy as portrayed by any given side, I think.

Similarly:

> it pushes about 5-10 megabits of traffic most of the time

Bits are a unit of information, not flow. Probably the author meant Mib/s.

You'll notice however that is a far cry from a representative summary of my point.

Anyway, there are people who've researched this, notably Jonathan Haidt. They created a website to talk about the problem here: https://heterodoxacademy.org/ . And they think that there is a problem of shrinking viewpoint diversity in the social sciences. My experience is that it's gotten worse, but we don't seem to be able to agree on that.

Protesters represent one tail of the distribution on some measure (e.g. "belief in social justice"). The fact that protests get more intense and/or more frequent and/or more populous are indications of a shift in the distribution (picture a normal distribution being shifted along the x axis).

That's what I am pointing to. I don't think everyone has to be in lockstep to be able to talk about what a given group does or believes or what not.

Perhaps "push" is the wrong word, yet it's the closest I can think of. I think the issue is more that liberals are overwhelmingly Democrat (that's hardly a controversial claim, I hope) and liberals tend to have certain values that make them care about individuals first rather than about society first.

I agree that it's all fuzzy, kind of like evolution doesn't have an actual goal. In some sense, evolution is about producing more fit individuals, yet it's not like it's a directed effort (various congenital disabilities still occur). It is "sort of" directed by environmental pressures, sort of like the "push" I'm talking about is "sort of" directed by the "progressive lens" if you will.

To me, it's sort of like a problem of bad goal alignment: suppose that the "goal" is to get out of a maze. For some reason, we get a fuzzy signal after each step that allows us to sort of guess whether it was a good move or not. So far, the right way seems to have been: "West, West, North, East". Some people guess that the pattern is that we had to go West for a while but there was a definite shift towards the East, so we have to go Eastward all the way through from now on. Others, see it as more of a clockwise thing and are guessing that the next move is going to be East or South.

At the end of the day, one of them may be right, or neither may be. But even if the next steps are "go North, then Westward all the way", it wouldn't invalidate the steps made before.

In other words, I don't think that the right way is to say "what would the progressive do? Alright, then let's do exactly the opposite". Rather, I think the problem is that the "push" I'm talking about is due to recognizing a pattern that isn't quite the right one.