xixi77

31 ms·

271.
by xixi77 13y ago
That's a good point; the way I see it, the general social justice movement is largely a movement against hierarchy, and for valuing all people equally. It is naturally allied with feminism in the sense that both see the elimination of
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by xixi77 13y ago
(was thinking of this as I was driving this morning) -- actually all the argumentation in that article, iirc, is essentially an inverted pyramid that all rests on one point: "there is a natural limit on the ratio of the $$ value of foo
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by xixi77 13y ago
Just looked at the former, and it starts with an example of zero-sum thinking -- namely, that someone's disadvantage is necessarily a source of an advantage for others. Other social justice concepts are apparently also derived from thi
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by xixi77 13y ago
I have a very high opinion about feminism (and absolutely agree with the top comment on all points; events like this are great and necessary), but this high opinion is not at all shared with concepts like privilege, oppression, and intersec
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by xixi77 13y ago
But, I am not actually appealing to common sense here -- that would make me no better than the "no infinite growth in finite world" people. So, are you suggesting that people will no longer be able to be of any value to others at
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by xixi77 13y ago
Middle class is going away for sure. It has always been a historical abnormality anyway. As for the latter -- people have been participating in monetary economy long before industrial revolution, and will be participating whichever way the
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by xixi77 13y ago
Look at what is happening in low-income countries now. You see a lot of small one-person/one-family businesses, which are effectively people buying themselves jobs (and being forced to carry equity risk of course). The state of the wo
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by xixi77 13y ago
What are the signs of either scarcity, or growth, being in danger of soon (or ever) going away? The asinine "infinite growth on a finite world has to be impossible" meme is getting really tired; but even if we subscribed to that n
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by xixi77 13y ago
As long as human beings are able to produce anything of value, jobs won't go away, and why would that ever stop being the case? There is a plenty of work to be done: take, e.g., personal help industry as an example of a field that used
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by xixi77 13y ago
As long as a human being is able to create anything of value, jobs are not going away, and that will never stop being the case. No need to even invent anything. Take, for example, the personal help industry: it is pretty much non-existant i
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by xixi77 13y ago
What are these non-mainstream feminist concerns that are being ignored here?
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by xixi77 13y ago
Lots of critical responses here. What is happening is that you can think of a personality profile as a vector in very high-dimensional space. MBTI presents a basis in a 4-dimensional subspace of that. How well it works for a particular pers
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by xixi77 13y ago
Actually, iirc one of the major criticisms of the Card & Krueger is that they only look at employment at national fast-food chains, and ignore local burger shacks -- and it is primarily the latter (and their workers) that are going to b
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by xixi77 13y ago
The question you have to ask is, where does this extra dollar come from? (owners' margins? wages of workers who are now unemployed? consumers' budgets?), and how much extra consumption it generates in the still-employed workers&
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by xixi77 13y ago
I am actually a little confused, why do you consider unemployment a market distortion, and how does the minimum wage helps to correct it?
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by xixi77 13y ago
And how exactly does "there is a paper that claims X" translate into "Economists agree that X is true"? Well, it doesn't. In fact, I would generally be skeptical about any claim that starts with "Economists agr
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by xixi77 13y ago
It's not so much about skills (there are no skills that a 25yo hacking since 10 would have that a 55yo hacking since 40 wouldn't), but about selection: people who were more interested in computers than anything else at 10 -- and w
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by xixi77 13y ago
I think what he argues against is a third culture, where the focus is on implementation of an algorithm in the code, rather than on the algorithm itself -- and generally, the algorithm is what matters more. Just a couple months ago I'v
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by xixi77 13y ago
Sure -- but I think (2), (4) and (5) are all forms of American Idol; all of these require persuasion of non-scientists, in case of (4) the persuasion simply happens at the point when the government body gets established and funded. And I&#x
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by xixi77 13y ago
a lot of people will make an upfront investment and get burnt out by their loss This is not a bug, this is an essential feature. This effectively generates matching funding, and thus multiplies the amount of money and effort spent on a pr
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by xixi77 13y ago
Has it ever been different? As long as science depends on funding, and funding always has (and always will) come from people who know and understand little of science, so persuading them to part with their money, and to give it to your part
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by xixi77 13y ago
Exactly. It's a near perfect example of brand dilution; the quality controls started slipping pretty fast, and TEDx just dropped the floor. You cannot maximize both content production and quality at the same time -- 99.9% of ideas out
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by xixi77 13y ago
This looks like a perfect example of what is wrong with TED these days (mostly TEDx, but it's really the original's fault for allowing TEDx's to dilute the brand pretty much to zero) -- that is, a vacuous rant with zero subst
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by xixi77 13y ago
Yes, particularly since the primary examples of penny-pinching seem to be buying furniture that is not fancy enough, and charging employees $40/month for parking garage (I'd love to have that! too bad I have to pay a good deal mor
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by xixi77 13y ago
Not sure -- to me it looks like at least the majority of commenters are quite strongly pro-regulation: e.g. look at all the discussions of AirBNB vs. zoning just a few weeks ago, or 23andme more recently. Sure, voter and commenter demograph
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by xixi77 13y ago
If they are satisfied with hiring "a jack of all trades who has mastered very few or none of them, and who will have to scramble like crazy just to meet the base requirements of the job, let alone excel at them." (which I agree is
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by xixi77 13y ago
One true valuation of anything is only possible in a world populated by precisely identical people. I call that a fantasy, not "objective reality".
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by xixi77 13y ago
The syntax is sensible, the language allows real OO and FP abstractions, you have easy access to basic data structures like lists and hashmaps, and there's a huge ecosystem of third-party libraries to build on Other than the last one
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by xixi77 13y ago
I'm not sure that's the distinction -- there is no shortage of general-purpose programming code written in R, as well as statistics done in Python. It's more about use cases -- is it all about statistics, or is actual statist
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by xixi77 13y ago
As everyone says, depends on what you are trying to do. For all interactive/exploratory analysis, for statistical graphics, for more advanced statistics, for most statistics-related research work in general, I would definitely pick R o

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