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Even if you find a "pure" utilitarian (which is rare), it's considered "naive utilitarianism" to ignore the long-term and broad effects of creating harm, and it's also considered intellectually arrogant to think you know enough about the impacts of your decisions and moral philosophy that you can justify causing definite short-term harm for potential long-term gain against the moral frameworks of just about everyone else.
On the whole, I can't personally think of any one person involved in EA, or widely-read EA literature, that promote or support that type of thinking.
This isn't true. I've lived in and visited plenty of northeastern suburbs and cities. The suburbs are largely not walkable: no sidewalk, long distances, and as a result basically nobody walks to any shop. The cities are walkable and with a large amount of residents actually walking.
But at work, I understand this mindset. Though personally, I still actually don't mind hearing people complain. And since I'm a manager, complaints are a very useful signal for me: even if I'm just in listening-mode, they give me more clarity on precisely what's going on in my team.
> One striking study, by Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach of Northwestern and Elizabeth Cascio of Dartmouth College, drew on data from Tennessee to study the impact of a delayed school start. The children in their sample were allocated randomly into different classrooms. Overall, Schanzenbach and Cascio found that being a year older had a positive impact on eighth-grade test scores, reduced the risks of repeating a grade before high school, and improved the chances of taking the SAT or ACT. The benefits for boys were at least twice as big as for girls on all measures through eighth grade. By high school, only boys were seeing any gains.
> Lastly, they found that the younger classmates of redshirted children suffered no negative consequences. If anything, they wrote, there were modestly positive spillover effects. That’s one reason to believe that girls would only be helped by this shift—having more mature boys in classrooms would likely improve the learning environment.
> Cascio and Schanzenbach’s research is the most robust to date, but their findings have been confirmed by a number of other studies. And related research has shown that redshirted boys are happier, too.
Personally, the type of problems I solve at work are more interesting than I could realistically come up with and work on on my own. Ymmv.
Do you have a source for that? Here in NYC things seem as popular as ever, with record-breaking rents due to high demand. Is it different elsewhere?
Regardless, even if it's true that some cities are struggling, that only makes it more important for them to focus on improving quality of life: a rise in WFH means people have more options, and a city that doesn't want to depopulate has to be an attractive place to live independent of economic opportunity.
I'd expect that to matter more if you're, say, trying to be a founder - I can see that benefitting from intentional planning. But for careers at big companies, "learn and get better" seems good enough (and if that qualifies as a plan, I don't think I've worked with anyone that doesn't have a plan).
I don't believe it was clear who said this, how confident it was that someone said this, and whether it was an off-the-cuff comment in support of a push for more growth or an actual deep assessment of the economics of the space.
Students also didn't like it because they felt it made the environment more competitive and less collaborative than at other schools, because an A for your peer means one less A for you.
Somewhere else in this comment section someone mentioned how going to Princeton during grade deflation era stopped them from becoming a doctor, and I'd say that's accurate.
Rideshare expanded the reach of taxi-like services to more regions, people, and use cases. It's now viable to travel without renting a car in many US cities - you can see this by how rideshare affected rental car companies. That's what makes the rideshare business hard: the places where they didn't have existing competition, because that's where the matching is harder and the economics not as easy.
It's a similar story for food delivery: GrubHub/Seamless operated in core areas of cities like NYC for many years (since the 90s in NYC, I think). Uber Eats brings that service to far more places, and that's where the challenge comes from in that business.
Varies by actual DB but: with this architecture, if the DBs are NoSQL then you didn't lose as much by splitting up the databases, but if they were SQL then among other things you lose transactions across those DBs (or now need costly distributed transactions), effectively making the collective SQL system behave more like a NoSQL DB.
Several years back, you had to also eventually get to L5. This was more affected by promo culture, but was also largely unenforced, which is why they get rid of the formal requirement to get to L5.
Take human suffering. There's no logical reason to care about it. You can't take someone with sociopathic tendencies and logic them into caring about humans - it simply doesn't make sense. Either that empathetic circuitry exists in someone's brain or it doesn't, which manifests as emotions when it does exist.
I think you're starting from a flawed premise that logic is a motivating force. Logic is a slave to the passions, not the other way around. Logic is a tool we use to manage our emotional state more effectively by helping us choose actions that we believe are more likely yield net positive emotional states. Logic just computes results; it has no innate motivation of any kind, it takes motivations and emotions as inputs.
Take this for example:
> beneficial to humanity.
You're implying a preference for humanity, which has some emotional foundation. Maybe you care about humans as a whole for some abstract emotional reason; or maybe it's purely self-interest since you're a human (so what benefits humans hopefully benefits you, even if you don't care about other humans) which is also an emotional reason. There's no objective, inarguable truth that you should care about humanity. The root of your confusion on animal rights stems here.
Ultimately, animal rights is about taking the empathy that most humans innately have to at least a limited extent, and expanding that to apply to more entities. If you experience no empathy in general in life, it makes no sense. If you experience some empathy, it makes some sense. If you experience a lot of empathy, it makes a lot of sense.
One motivator is societal good and fairness to ensure that great opportunities are as equally available as possible, and that nobody avoids or leaves the industry due to their race or gender.
The other is making sure you have more demographic variation that can make a better product for more people. A classic example is avoiding gaffs in ML models based on skin color. All else equal, the more representative your employees are of your target user base, the more likely someone is to raise the right questions early. This is especially true for consumer tech where engineers are part of the process of deciding what gets built, but also true in cases like thinking about ML fairness.
I don't live in a suburb so it would be very odd for me to complain about a hypothetical suburb I don't live in, even though I'd have more complaints if I did live in a suburb. Just how HN as a whole talks about making tech jobs better (e.g. this remote work thread, which isn't relevant to most jobs) far more than it does about other jobs: it's just more relevant to the people here, and even if they overall like their tech job, they want it to be better.
These are the prices we pay today in the US, but they don't have to be. Other countries like The Netherlands and Switzerland take noise pollution more seriously and show it's possible to have quieter cities. Even among huge cities it's possible: Tokyo is much quieter than NYC.
We don't need to make people choose between living in dense, efficient spaces vs calm and quiet. Making urban living more comfortable is a net benefit: the people that live there will be happier, people that wanted to live there but avoided due to noise will now have that option, and people outside of cities would be unaffected. Why accept this as just the way it is when plenty of other cities have shown it can be better?
This video shows what it's like when a city takes noise more seriously (in this case, the whole of The Netherlands). It focuses on cars, but apartment noises can be handled too with building codes. https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8
The more evidence you have that this person is more likely to have the disease, the more useful the test becomes. Some examples:
- if the disease is more common among people over age 65, it's more useful on people in that age group
- if the person displays more symptoms associated with the disease, and not also associated with more common diseases, then it's more useful for someone with those symptoms
- if a disease is common in an area of the world, and the person has traveled there, the test is more useful
The more factors you have, the less likely a false positive. This is why it's often better to avoid medical tests unless there's a reason to suspect someone is at elevated risk for a disease: a positive result is more likely to be a false positive.
This similarly happens to more junior who seem to be on a steep upwards trajectory: the company tries to retain them with money (stock) before they actually get good enough to get promoted, because there's high confidence they'll grow fast.
Someone who earns into the next pay band is pretty likely to be promoted in the near future, once they've shown they can sustain it.
Google Search ads are bucketed under "Google Search & other" in financial statements, which is just one of their "Avertising revenue" categories as defined here: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/additional-financial-informat...
[0] https://goo.gl/maps/4RtUzUUfjvMpLs8y6 (this street has a small painted sidewalk since it has more commercial activity, though pedestrians often walk in the middle; the adjacent streets have no painted sidewalk).
Outside that, I still don't think you're most likely to get a McDonald's in the middle of a residential neighborhood: it'd most likely be a corner store, since that's what walkable areas are most full of. At least in NYC, it's uncommon to have fast food outside of a busy shopping street. The shops embedded in the middle of residential neighborhoods are largely corner stores and delis, and to a lesser extent cafes / bakeries and barber shops / hair salons.