SatanicNotMessianic

I have to agree with the previous comment. I do not find this horrific or even disturbing, but very comforting.

Can you help us understand what aspects of this you feel some people might find discomforting?

It wasn’t, really. We need to stop attributing some kind of infinite foresight and wisdom to the authors of the constitution. The Supreme Court was a bad idea poorly implemented, the senate as the superior house was a fucking terrible idea, and the independent executive is not defensible at this point.

The authors (who, let’s remember, were working with a 17th century philosophy on the nature of humankind that has since been discredited) were operating on entirely different premises, for an entirely different country, and balancing things like slavery and freedom and democracy versus rule by the elite (the elite were justified to rule by their identity as being elites) by trying to come to a middle ground compromise on those and related issues. It’s really kind of crap by modern democratic, political, and philosophical standards. The only reason it hasn’t been addressed is that we’ve become self-aware enough that we’re terrified that US democracy has fallen to the point that we could only do worse than 18th century slaveholders, landlords, and wealthy lawyers.

To make it explicit, the authors thought that a) the rich would put the country’s interests ahead of their own, b) that selfishness would mean people wanted to protect their branch of government rather than their party, and c) that part b would be a sufficient bulwark against demagoguery. They believed in a world where men (and I mean men, specifically, and rich men in particular) were rational actors who would act in their own self-interest.

Don’t get me wrong - they were reading the scholars of their time - but if political and social science hasn’t made advances in the past three centuries we should probably just give it up.

May I present to you the teratoma?

If you’re feeling brave, go ahead and do an image search. Not only more cells, but things like teeth and hair and bones.

Nice work, god. Great design. Absolute perfection in his image and all that.

The fun part is that over 50% of fertilizations result in a miscarriage, either due to a failure to implant or because of another pregnancy related event, all due to natural causes. So if a fertilized egg equals a person, they might want to have a talk with that god fella, who engineered it that way on purpose.

It’s going to be a glorious disaster. Didn’t they slash the initial IPO estimate about six months after announcing it and shortly before the whole API thing? I haven’t cared enough to follow it closely, especially since abandoning the platform, but it really seems like the stakeholders wanting to cash in on a sinking ship before it finally goes down.

Please keep in mind that these books should be acceptable by the school and approachable by students who would be unlikely to accept or read very progressive material, so themes that strongly (just strongly) contradict Western narratives should be avoided.

This made me hesitate, but then I decided that you’re more than capable of reading a summary or skimming a book and deciding whether or not it makes a fit.

Let me start with some obvious ones:

• Orientalism by Edward Said

• A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

• 90% of Chomsky’s work

• 21 Things They Don’t Teach You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang. Chang is an economist who I believe studied under the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. They both research the economies of developing countries, with Chang having a specialization in South Korea. He accused developed countries of “kicking away the ladder” when they force the Washington Consensus on developing economies while having violated those norms as their own economies developed.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond - There’s a lot wrong with the book but it does make for an effective deconstruction of the myth of western cultural superiority by proposing a physical/geographical explanation.

Better than GGS would be any book by David Graeber, who for my money was the greatest anthropologist of our time and who brings a radical preconception of some of the most treasured but false narratives in the development of western history and capitalism. Debt is his most famous work, I think, but I’d especially recommend The Dawn of Everything.

Che Guevara by Jon Lee Anderson - the best bio of Che that I’ve read, but it’s really, really long. Maybe just watch Motorcycle Diaries and Even The Rain (which is about modern and even liberal colonialism but not Che).

Anything about James Baldwin

The Social Conquest of the Earth by EO Wilson. Wilson was the biologist who founded the field of sociobiology and who towards the end of his career came to the conclusion that its because humans exhibit the highest levels of cooperation (eusociality) that we’ve come to dominate the planet, for better and for worse.

I realize that a lot of these are US centric, and I’ve left out virtually everything on LGBT history and culture, but I think this might be a good start.

I know that’s a popular saying, and there is some truth to it, but it’s not the whole story. Encryption protocols used by the intelligence services, for example, are highly secure and not open source, while open source encryption protocols have themselves become vulnerable to attack.

Enigma is a primary example of this. While at the time it was considered unbreakable (by both German and Allied intelligence), the knowledge of the physical and logical operation of the Enigma device was key in breaking the code. Codebreaking usually relies on a combination of intelligence gathering and mathematical analysis, and open sourcing it solves a big part of that picture.

I’m saying this as an old school cypherpunk - I’ve since gotten out of it in favor of math I find more interesting - and a user and advocate for technologies like PGP. I used PGP for a long time on many of my emails, and I even had the PGP in Four (later, Three) Lines of Perl as my email sig to show how stupid it was to declare encryption a weapon for export purposes. What I’m saying is that I’m an ally.

I’ve also gone long past the point in my career where I feel comfortable with categoricals like that, and I had a few minutes to type up a reply that will be read by fewer than ten people.

No worries about the lack of sleep. I’ve been there and then some.

I do think however that you’re misinterpreting my argument to at least some extent.

First, it’s a completely noisy signal. It’s also, unfortunately, the only thing we have when a CV lands on our desk. It obviously decreases in importance as the number of positions held/publications made/other experiences increase. If someone were to have a dozen pubs in reputable journals and ten years experience working in what I’m interested in, I’m not going to take their school into account. The other, later work is much more relevant. If on the other hand they transferred from MIT to Liberty University and that’s the only data point I have, that’s what I am going to need to go off of. I have a lot of resumes to look at, and still have to do my regular full time job. I’m not arguing that it’s not noisy. I’m just pointing out that if we consider something like a weighted function in CV evaluation, the fewer items there are, the higher the weights assigned to non-preferred variables might be. I’ve collaborated with researchers from some of the most respected institutions in the world, and other than arrogance I can’t say that they had a whole lot in common.

Second, I do not think ability falls on a bell curve. I believe talent is a highly skewed distribution. It might get more normal the more you remove sources of variability - I don’t think you could pick someone at random off the street and ask them to write up a Bayesian classifier, but if you reduced the sample down to stats/ML grads, you’d probably find some are better and some are worse but you might see a meaningful average being drawn. I was just trying to make it easier to visualize. I am an actual data scientist (well, complexity theorist), and I am not naive about data.

In terms of social power, that’s absolutely one of the main reasons people pay the outrageous tuitions for those institutions. I do need to note for anyone reading along that those same institutions will waive tuition if your family income is below $150k or so, so do not write them off. We need more diversity.

That’s not entirely true. Gerrymandering can affect statewide elections in two ways.

The first is turnout suppression. If voters feel that their votes do not matter (for instance, if they constantly end up voting for local/district positions that they “lose”), they’re less likely to vote. That’s why people interested in vote suppression make such frequent use of the “both sides” memes. This is part of a larger effort that includes ID laws, registration restrictions, and disallowing vote by mail.

Second is resource restrictions based on districts. I know that in both TX and AZ there have been around-the-block lines with multi-hour waits to vote in some districts, while others were basically walk in and walk out. Yes, high density populations will require more resources than low density ones, but you generally don’t see state legislatures passing bills to remove polling places from low density areas so that rural voters are required to drive for hours to get to the closest urban polling place.

I have a few honest questions for anyone who supports this kind of legislation.

First, what problem specifically is this trying to address? Have teen pregnancies gone up since the advent of kids being able to access porn on the internet? Kids with STDs? Sexual assaults on children? What specific metric has changed that makes this kind of legislation a priority right now? Is there a model that shows a correlation between the behaviors this legislation intends to address and the social ills you believe are associated with it?

Second is the related question of what metrics you think will improve with the introduction of this legislation? How long do you think it will take for that change to come about? If it does not, would you support removing this legislation?

Third, if a social ill were to be associated as per the above with online content, would you support similar legislation to regulate access (eg, if hate speech or LGBT-phobia posted online were to show a positive correlation with intolerance or violence), would you require online services to monitor access to sites hosting that kind of content, such as requiring a government issued ID to be kept on record and associated with specific user accounts?

Due to sales and distribution rights, you’ll find that there are shows and movies that you can get on DVD but not buy digitally. This isn’t an Apple TV problem - they’re simply not available for digital purchase.

As you might suspect, this mostly affects older media. For example, the first few seasons of Project Runway are only available on DVD.

At this point, though, I have to jump through so many hoops to watch physical media (hook up a computer, find and attach a drive for it, update the drivers or find a third party app for playback, etc) that it’s just not worth it.

So, for me, my answer if “yes.” I stopped using any physical media because it’s easier to just go digital. I decided that ease of use outweighed the tradeoffs, although there are some.

If you’re talking about the “elite” schools - Ivy or otherwise - there’s a little bit more to it.

A resume is a really, really low bandwidth way to get a feel for someone. Of that’s all you have to go on for starters, it at least tells you which gauntlets they’ve already run. It’s like hiring someone who has worked at Apple or Google for ten years.

As a simplifying assumption, think of ability as a normal distribution - a bell curve. The average on Stanford grads may be higher than those of Liberty University, although there still may be enough overlap that you can’t say that any given candidate is better from one or the other.

If you’re talking about someone who transferred out of Harvard to go to Austin University or whatever they’re calling themselves, that opens up an entirely different set of questions.