iguy

23 ms·

181.
by iguy 6y ago
Yes the history with buddhism's wax & waning is interesting, I'd like to know more. Especially since it seems both high-class and low-class people were involved. I have the impression many were disappointed in how much convers
182.
by iguy 6y ago
This is indeed a common point of view among some scholars. But scholarship on such things tends to be very politicised. If the essence of caste is about who you marry, then we now have excellent genetic evidence that it was a very big deal
183.
by iguy 6y ago
The Roma are much closer to a caste, as far as I know. I mean in terms of their history & behaviour (for want of a better word): the borders of who is & isn't a traveller have been more porous over time, while I think the Roma
184.
by iguy 6y ago
Not an expert, but I hear that one of the effects has been to slow down innovation. Because a newly designed plane (with a rescue parachute, and a modern engine) is so much more expensive than one from the 1950s (leaded gas, possibly with g
185.
by iguy 6y ago
> but I do know that data with respect to college admissions: HS GPA is consistently as good or slightly better than standardized test scores. The data I've seen says the reverse, that SAT is a better predictor than GPA, but both to
186.
by iguy 6y ago
> I would expect a company with more diverse leadership to outperform, because they are able to access more talent. You implicitly assume that the performance of a leadership team is the sum of the talent of its members. I'm sure th
187.
by iguy 6y ago
> With respect, I'll defer to the career sociologists and psychologists on the topic, much as I'd defer to the risk management PhD on the topic of risk management. This isn't a good heuristic, without some way of judging t
188.
by iguy 6y ago
Note that 90% of people in England weren't in London, circa 1800.
189.
by iguy 6y ago
I think part of it is that corporations hadn't really been invented yet. So for any venture too expensive for one person, you needed to gather backers... and they had to gather somewhere. Maybe we should think of this as the slime mold
190.
by iguy 6y ago
London hit 90% literacy around 1750, and that's including the guys who shovelled horse-shit for a living, I'm pretty sure patrons of Lloyd's were very close to 100% literate from the start. But how much people had read, and
191.
by iguy 6y ago
I think the argument being made there is that when you gather smart people together, with resources to work on a hard problem, they will tend to invent things on the side which we didn't know we needed. An academic committee to decide
192.
by iguy 6y ago
Yes that's a hurdle. But even without that, it seems hard to design a good system. If most of the doctors treat the very sick cases (among those diagnosed with X) with drugs Y+Z currently rumoured to work, how do you disentangle the ca
193.
by iguy 6y ago
Not a medical person, but I think this is much like asking "what's a species?". Nature is clearly clumpy, your body has one heart & two lungs & they have obviously different tissues & purposes. But precisely how m
194.
by iguy 6y ago
What seems weird about this is that the process for deciding that an approved drug is useful for a certain condition (not the one it was intended for) is really informal, it seems to rely on common knowledge circulating in the guild. For th
195.
by iguy 6y ago
I thought this was the claim of TFA being summarised. They have examples with walls of text from which I can't guess anything, but whether those are representative of inscriptions on so-damaged statues I don't know.
196.
by iguy 6y ago
I mean don't leave them on autopilot, then you get the same stump speech they have given many times. Instead push them off-trail just a bit, make them talk about some unexpected connection or comparison, so they have to think. Agree th
197.
by iguy 6y ago
Oh right, I wouldn't call my moaning here helpful advice! Nor expect everyone's tastes to agree. Maybe I'm hoping someone will tell me who I should listen to, instead.
198.
by iguy 6y ago
> If the guests would feel in the same way, then they wouldn’t be talking with Lex. I am often reminded of this anecdote: "Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, a
199.
by iguy 6y ago
I feel the same way at OP, amazing guests, but can't he push them a bit? What I'd like is more like what Tyler Cowen does, on non-tech subjects [1]. He gives the impression of having read all their books (and their opponents'
200.
by iguy 6y ago
And the big players had a stronger monopoly than seems possible today. Downloading obscure foreign movies isn't quite as easy as Netflix, but in 1960 what wasn't on TV or a few screens was just about unobtainable for almost everyo
201.
by iguy 6y ago
That's what Augustine says. It sounds like a chisel was not involved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24792909
202.
by iguy 6y ago
TFA quotes Augustine on this, but no idea how much he said.
203.
by iguy 6y ago
Lots of greek & roman statues have lost their noses too. Also, you may be thinking that because Egypt is in Africa, its people in 2000BC were African in the colloquial sense of today. That's far from obvious, the Sahara is wide. Al
204.
by iguy 6y ago
Maybe the take-away is that in different eras statues were broken in different ways for different purposes. Various Egyptian groups broke each other's statues, which they fully understood, for instance breaking the left hand of gods un
205.
by iguy 6y ago
> watch their language on all discoverable mediums, and those that have never been sued Yes I see how this has come about. I'm trying to say that it's not a very healthy place for our society to have ended up. And I'm expl
206.
by iguy 6y ago
It still seems that every time you push people from vividly describing what the problem is, as they see it, to cloaking it in something bureaucratic like "considered all possible concerns", you get lower bandwidth. And, both your
207.
by iguy 6y ago
I get that damping down language on "dominating the market" isn't going to hurt anyone. But on engineering matters, it does seem problematic to put legal before technical. Instead of people using the medium they would otherwi
208.
by iguy 6y ago
If mining in a big way didn't happen until the 1870s, maybe that implied it was difficult, for the tools of earlier times? Too deep?
209.
by iguy 6y ago
> the difference between Dutch windmills and English waterwheels was a wash (no pun intended) at the critical early part of the First Industrial Revolution Would be interesting to see numbers on this. I would have guessed there was subst
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by iguy 6y ago
Thanks, didn't see this comment while I was digging for references for mine... I'm sure I read something more recent & more quantitative. But the site you link has this which is not bad: https://solar.lowtechmagazin

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