Analogize this to publicly praising a corrupt general for doing or planning something good that he hasn't actually been doing. It's difficult for him to turn down the praise ("No, I seriously haven't done anything to deserve this"), and meanwhile it focuses eyes on him and pressures him to actually do the thing. I read about the tactic in a fictional book once, I'm sure it works. :-)
Surprised he didn't win any champion of due process awards.
many still think he's one of the greatest Presidents of all time
man what is up with that tho
For me, he's the greatest President because of the ACA.
This is the very definition of uncritical, subjective thinking. :\
It's not a matter of opinion that you have to pay property taxes. It is a matter of opinion that you should have health insurance - as you may recall there isn't even a nominal financial penalty for not doing so any more.
But based on your comments so far, you see the situation as the opposite? I don't understand what you think you are being ordered to do.
Obama sucked at his job. Like, nearly Carter-level blindness to political reality, but with more personal arrogance. Obama was better than Shrub. Shrub was a war criminal, so you'd have to hope Obama was better.
The ACA was emblematic of Obama's unwillingness to lift a finger to help build the Democratic grassroots. The Democrats in Congress allowed the ACA to be loaded with poison pills due to Obama's insistence on a bipartisan vote. The result: no votes from the Gops, but it did cause the Democrats to lose the House since -- due to the Gop amendments -- the good parts didn't kick in until well after the midterm elections and the bad parts started immediately.
So popular was the ACA, in the end, that it only survived the Trump years because McCain lost his temper on the day of the Senate vote to repeal it.
To say nothing of the source of the prize itself.
What's most disgusting is that it was a political ploy based on the fact that President Obama was America's first black president. There's no other logical conclusion that any thinking person could arrive at, because at the time he received it, he had done, quite literally, almost nothing of substance.
None of this excuses the imperial adventures that followed. Libya's still in a civil war, by the way. (Although to be fair to Obama, Europe was chomping at the bit to go to war with it.)
This is a good theory, I don't think it reflects the situation though. She used her 'acceptance speech' for this absurd accolade to emphasise the importance of censorship in ensuring freedom, that war is peace, freedom is slavery, so on so on. If this was the aim, it clearly didn't work.
Given her speech, the irony is either totally lost on her, or she legitimately thinks that YouTube is such a monolithic entity that the truth is whatever she says it is.
1. YouTube bet on user generated content. One of Wojcicki's primary decisions was to focus on commercial high-end content by trying to cut deals with firms like Disney.
2. YouTube bet on Flash Video. Google Video used a VLC-based browser plugin that never worked as well and didn't have as much distribution. This was partly driven by the first decision, because Flash didn't support the video DRM that movie houses wanted, and was optimised for small low bandwidth, "postage stamp" sized video instead of high-def full screen that commercial content wanted. YouTube had no formal strategy around commercial content beyond turning a blind eye towards the piracy on their platform, that let them outsource their video tech to Macromedia, who were quite good at it.
3. YouTube bet on social. They had comments, thumbs up, thumbs down, channels and other social features when Google Video was still a search engine badly welded to a video store. Google didn't "get" social at that time and GV/Wojcicki saw it as a net negative anyway because does Disney really want their premium content to be shown next to a bunch of inane comments from anonymous trolls?
4. YouTube was implemented in Python. Google Video was implemented in C++. Python allowed the YT guys to iterate way faster and throw features out the door way faster, at a cost in performance and reliability. But a social website doesn't really need much reliability and whilst the performance costs were killing them, Google bailed them out after the purchase by rewriting and porting large parts of their stack to their in house tech.
I think those were the main problems identified in the post-mortems.
What's interesting is that of course the general themes here are identical to what is causing YouTube problems now. Wojcicki was obsessed with professional/authoritative content. It killed Google Video then because there was a competitor who bet on the little guy, but now she controls that competitor she's doing it all over again. YT is actively suppressing the little guys in favour of big media, they've added a video store, their recommendations aren't social anymore but rather just promoting whatever political elites are saying today, she's removing other social features like downvotes, etc etc. She never learned anything from her prior failure, and why would she? When Vic G failed at Google+ he was immediately fired, but Wojcicki cannot be penalised for failure. Whether that's due to her familial connections, her gender or what is hard to say, but the contrast between her and what happened to other execs that failed to beat their competition is hard not to notice.
https://nypost.com/2021/03/31/youtube-is-testing-removal-of-...
So in the Puritan Village, the ministers give themselves freedom of religion awards for their contributions to freeing the True Religion from all impediments to its universal imposition.
Combine that observation with the Flynn effect and it explains why common sense is never as common as it used to be... Maybe Google's best bet at this point is to hire people with a wide diversity of IQ scores.
Why? How do you see a distinction there?
Google = San Francisco = good people.
It's just SV patting itself on the back for being woke and more virtuous than you.
Contrast Vs traditional traditional CEOs more likely to be hired on the basis of their network and charistma vs actual engineering chops?
Just look at the recent debacle with the proposed (and now thankfully failed) football SuperLeague in Europe, you have 12 billionaire owners thinking that they could go ahead with killing the spirit of the game that is ingrained in the social fabric of the continent just like that, almost by fiat.
It's like how the potatoes in discounters always say 'premium quality' or 'premium potatoes' but if they are, they wouldn't be so cheap or you couldn't buy them at the discounter. OTOH, if you go to a specialty goods shop, they don't write premium on their products. So if something has to be labeled on how good it is, it's probably not.
I've heard many people say similar things over the years... Why is that? Is it some kind of kin selection? Is this total lack of self-awareness a requirement for getting into positions of power?
It's so obvious, I even wonder if they're just pretending to be hypocrites? It seems so simple and obvious, how can they not see the logical contradiction?
Are most of our leaders complete nutjobs?
Maybe humanity is a hierarchy with all the nutjobs at the top, mirroring back their insanity inside their filter bubbles; not realizing that their lives have nothing to do with reality.
We have a word for that: Hubris
More people will hear about the first part of that sentence so I guess it's still somewhat advantageous to them?
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
Also, you don't really know the distribution of where these 'believers' came from.
Edit: And come to think of it, that kind of intellectual soft flex is actually exactly the kind of thing the Lewis quote refers to, just presented in a different venue. It's my understanding Daesh recruitment propaganda has a similar tone.
The quote has no truth. It’s a fantasy used as anti-intellectual propaganda. Anyone can say a clever platitude.
I'm sure that criticizing Q-anon is a red flag too for some people.
I assume you mean nobody can presently create fully functional organs for someone that wasn't born with them. I don't know who disputes this.
But when you make such a declaration, it sounds (to some) like you are denying biological reality yourself; claiming that there is no such thing as intersex, that chromosomes are always in alignment with physical characteristics, and so on. There are complex processes necessary for the emergence of typical characteristics, and just because it's strongly bimodal doesn't mean that's 100%. Anyone educated knows it isn't, completely apart from politics.
If one agrees that such things are well-known for a long time and not controversial, and that there appear to be gender related differences in the brain, then it's not reasonable to declare that "an X brain in a Y body" is impossible or delusional. You can't know, and it's particularly antisocial to go around telling people stuff about themselves when you can't possibly have rational grounds for it.
And yeah, I talked to people who were saying that biological sex doesn't exist and gender is all there is to it.
If male == can sire children and female == can bear children, then infertile people don't have a sex which is nonsense.
> It does not disprove the general notion
Yes, it does. Counterexamples do that.
> You could be born with six fingers and that doesn't invalidate the fact that human species have 5 fingers at each hand.
Yes, it would. Humans only usually have 5 fingers on each hand. But it isn't important to emphasize that there are 6-fingered humans because no one denies that 6-fingered humans are humans to start with.
Your conclusion is nonsense, the premise is not. A broken computer is still in essence a computer, even if it can't actually do any computing as a result.
> Yes, it would. Humans only usually have 5 fingers on each hand. But it isn't important to emphasize that there are 6-fingered humans because no one denies that 6-fingered humans are humans to start with.
It's some kind of genetic disorder, an anomaly. With your standard you can't describe anything, as almost nothing is true 100% of the time.
My conclusion is derived from the premise. Since it's nonsense so is the premise.
> A broken computer is still in essence a computer, even if it can't actually do any computing as a result.
An infertile woman is broken then?
> It's some kind of genetic disorder, an anomaly. With your standard you can't describe anything, as almost nothing is true 100% of the time.
Of course you can. 100% of non-broken computers can be used for computing -- the "non-broken" part is usually implied when talking about them. Same for lots of other categories. If the members of a category don't have any shared traits -- i.e. something that is true for all of them -- then what is it even useful for?
I don't know if I would necessarily use this particular word as it's mostly associated with lifeless objects, but in a sense - yes. Similarly to how having a disability or being an amputee is, for the lack of a better term, being "broken", as your body fails to function is some manner. Life is more nuanced and it's not all about that of course, but you get the idea.
> Of course you can. 100% of non-broken computers can be used for computing -- the "non-broken" part is usually implied when talking about them.
So a broken computer is no longer a computer? I'm too stupid to delve into a philosophical debate about what truly makes a thing a thing, but I just don't accept that.
Even still, there is always a chance that the computer will randomly malfunction and do something unexpected at any time. Unlikely, but possible. So you can never say for sure that an operation of 2 + 2 will result in 4.
> If the members of a category don't have any shared traits -- i.e. something that is true for all of them -- then what is it even useful for?
If it's accurate enough then it's useful for making predictions. You know, science and stuff.
I wonder, how would you describe what a 'human' is?
Your point?
> If it's accurate enough then it's useful for making predictions. You know, science and stuff.
If there is a counterexample to a scientific hypothesis, it's considered falsified. Not "useful for making predictions", but simply wrong.
I see what your issue is. I haven't noticed this previously, but I think you're just attacking a straw man at this point. Rarely you can say something with 100% certainty and science takes account for that. It's fine to make generalizations. If we didn't do that and only sought absolute truths, we wouldn't get too far and it'd invalidate entire fields of science.
And it's particularly not okay to make generalizations about people. That's how you get sexism, sexism and other bigotry.
But in many contexts biological sex is irrelevant. There's room to debate exactly what contexts -- e.g., in professional sports that are segregated by sex so that women can have competitions in which they aren't obliterated by men who are just stronger, you might want to keep people with Y chromosomes out of the women's events, or maybe you should do that by measuring testosterone levels or something. But by and large, if you aren't (1) providing medical care to someone or (2) having sex with them, you get better outcomes for everyone by paying attention to how they prefer to live than to their chromosomes when those diverge.
"But people are getting cancelled just for saying that biological sex is real!" Eh, no. But to whatever degree anything like that is happening, a key part of the reason is that it turns out that people who make a big deal about how biological sex is real almost always actually have a bigger agenda that goes way beyond affirming that biological sex is real. If e.g. you want to keep trans women out of women's public bathrooms, or make sure gender-dysphoric teenagers aren't put on puberty blockers, or not have to call someone "he" if they look more like a "she" to you -- none of those things follow from "biological sex is real".
https://archive.md/wWaat#selection-1333.275-1347.126
> The orders also reference "biological sex," a disputed term that refers to the sex as listed on students' original birth certificates.
> It's not possible to know a person's gender identity at birth, and there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth.
Proposition A: "Chromosomes, genitals, and sex hormones are real things. For the large majority of people, each of these falls into one of two fairly well separated classes, and they agree with one another. In some contexts -- e.g., providing someone with medical care, or having sex with them, or predicting how much weight they will be able to lift if they train hard -- these things provide useful information."
Proposition B: "The term 'biological sex' has a clear and universally agreed-on meaning, and refers to something that is useful in some contexts, as in Proposition A."
Proposition C: "The term 'biological sex' has a clear and universally agreed-on meaning, and refers to something that is useful in some contexts, and is the only thing we should care about when deciding whether to refer to someone as a man or a woman, or choosing what pronouns to use for them, or deciding what contests they can enter, what bathrooms they can use, etc."
Proposition A is uncontroversially true, and (I claim) essentially no one disagrees with it.
Proposition B is fairly uncontroversially false, because in fact there isn't a universally-agreed way to decide someone's "biological sex" in complicated cases such as when they have complete androgen insensitivity. But for many purposes it's approximately true.
The bit of Proposition C that goes beyond Proposition B is highly controversial.
I originally took your statements about "biological sex" to be expressing Proposition A. The author of the CNN article is denying Proposition B.
Perhaps you always meant Proposition B (or even Proposition C), in which case I retract my statement that no one disagrees with that, but instead point out the bit of Proposition B that's controversial is not expressing a "fundamental truth" about reproduction but a highly disputable claim about language, and that the further bits of Proposition C that are controversial are again not expressing "fundamental truths" about reproduction but controversial and essentially political claims about how we should relate to people for whom "biological sex" and "gender identity" don't tell a single simple coherent story.
But it's not the only way to do it, and if you do that you won't necessarily agree with other people about a person's "biological sex".
For instance, there is a condition called "complete androgen insensitivity syndrome". A person with CAIS has one X and one Y chromosome, just like a typical man, and they produce male sex hormones much like a typical man does. (Maybe exactly the same? I'm not sure whether there are feedback loops that might go wrong.) But the cells in their body that are meant to respond to those hormones don't, and as a result a person with CAIS looks pretty much exactly like a typical woman does. Breasts, mostly-normal-female genitalia, not much body hair, higher-pitched voice, etc. But^2 they don't have a uterus, they aren't fertile (either "as" male or female), and there are internal genital differences that may have adverse consequences for their sex life if nothing is done about them.
If you just go by chromosomes, you will classify people with CAIS as male. But these people are all assigned female at birth, and they usually have no idea until puberty that there is anything at all unusual about their sex or gender. Their gender identity is almost always F rather than M, and they are generally heterosexual in the sense of being attracted to men.
So, what is the "biological sex" of someone with CAIS? I think several answers are defensible, but none is clearly correct or universally agreed. So "biological sex" is not a term with a clear-cut meaning in every case, contrary to "Proposition B".
> I'm a fairly open minded person
Open minded people don't need to say that.
Physics PhD people are not people fallen from skies with a little extra brain. They just got the time, opportunity, and tips to be there. Same goes for other "smart" people. There are, of course, exceptions like von Neuman, Turing, Feynman, Einstein, etc. But these people are exceptions. Perceptions abourt other people in those fields should not be formed with the image of these guys.
Source: very first hand experiences.
IQ is not taken seriously as a measure of intelligence or success anymore. And people can be trained to score high on IQ tests.
On the debate of Nature vs. Nurture, I do not think that inherent intelligence viz. good genes do not play a role. But I tend to belive that nurture has a larger to play.
This kind of thing happens all the time among Exec. level, but normally we'd expect it from Ford CEO, not Google types. It may be an odd sign of industry maturity.
That said, we shouldn't discount how often this kind of stuff actually does work. Watching the crowd at the Oracle conf. eat up Larry Ellison's huffery as through he was some kind of market visionary was the lesson at the other end of the spectrum, and it's that 'If you're rich and stand on stage and say something that 'sounds credible', a lot of people with just believe it'. Of course there's more to it than that.
But this one is Comedy Gold.
It might be a sign that Susan does not have a fully trusted team around her ... I would beg my boss in stark words to not do something so ridiculous to themselves.