simon_

Analyses on this topic are always so bad. Some counterpoints:

(1) CEOs are intentionally aligned with shareholders, for good reason. Shareholders often make money due to luck, so eliminating luck from CEO compensation without breaking alignment is a very hard problem.

(2) Going in, a CEO (or a shareholder) needs to lock down a big future payday in the upside case, in order to compensate them for the risk of the downside case. Yes, the upside case usually involves some luck, but the "optionality" to get paid in a lucky outcome is a valuable part of the deal.

(3) CEOs are also paid to be trustworthy agents for shareholders/boards. Like... if I am a billionaire looking for you to oversee a big part of my capital, I may pay a lot just because I know you are a good/smart/reasonable person who will be autonomous but raise the right issues to me if needed, reliably. I might know all that just because we have been buddies for years, and even though there are lots of objectively more talented people out there who would do the job for less, paying you more would not be irrational for me.

One might as well say: "20K+ fatalities on the Boko Haram insurgency, and counting, but you're up in arms about one maybe-murder in the most privileged city in the world."

Not every community needs to be about every thing.

Sigh, it is hard for me to imagine that this comment was made in good faith.

First of all, owning "free and clear" is hardly the expected meaning of ownership in the context of cars or especially houses in the US. I have a mortgage and I still say I own my house. When I told friends I was buying my house, I expect >90% of them assumed I was getting a mortgage. The government reported "homeownership rate" certainly does not exclude households with mortgages.

Second of all, ignoring semantics, the original context was a conversation about whether a significant number of households being unable to afford technology like a $5K computer would stifle innovation. Innovation probably doesn't care whether customers are in debt or not, so this is still perfectly decent evidence to cite about the spending capacity of poor households.

"Disappointing but not surprising". Sigh.

It does. Big pharma constantly acquires research-focused junior companies to input into its pipeline for regulatory approval / commercialization.

Well, it is also the world of professors, grad students, administrators, etc.

I know American culture is in love with undergrads and their "college experience", but I don't see why they are such key stakeholders that they should be allowed to demand that members of those other groups be fired and otherwise make their lives and work difficult.

Customers usually don't have any mechanism for getting the CEO fired other than not buying the product.

I would not write them off - my whole point is that by making the double argument people are trying to avoid having to think about trade offs.

I get very suspicious when I see conjunctive arguments that neuter hard value judgments. It's extremely common to see them: "I think you doing X is objectionable AND it doesn't even work!" Example from the right:

Gun control is unconstitutional AND criminals will still get guns anyway!

In my experience, the second half of these arguments usually has nothing to do with the arguer's real motivations, it just helps him/her avoid cognitive dissonance from the trade offs.

I am always annoyed by the argument that torture is unacceptable AND it doesn't work. It's not totally implausible that this is true, but I think it's very likely that torture "works" in some sense and certainly everyone practicing it expects it to work.

So... for an anti-torture position to have some meat to it, you have to make it clear that you think torture is unacceptable even when it does work.

If you're not willing to sacrifice real lives and safety to avoid torture, I don't think you are meaningfully against it, and you certainly stand no chance of persuading those convinced of its efficacy.

I think when he says "genuine", he means they are genuinely giving it a try, not that they are doing it out of pure spiritual authenticity.

Most business decisions (and most decisions) are made on some other basis than passion, nothing wrong with that.

I won't presume to tell you that you've evaluated your situation fundamentally incorrectly. If you've come to this point, I doubt that hearing "there is always hope" is going to sway you. Personally, I think you have the right to make whatever decision you like about your own life.

BUT: I know from my own life that it is easy to forget about the value of keeping your options open. Death really is permanent, and always available, so there is rarely a need to rush it. All kinds of unexpected good things really can happen... and if not... you can still kill yourself later.

SO: I'd suggest you make sure you adjust your thinking for the likely bias that you are undervaluing the option-value in all the unexpected good things you can't specifically imagine right now. If you have even a little uncertainty on this point... better to wait a bit and see, no?

Yep, having ever had to make hard decisions in serious situations should definitely disqualify presidential hopefuls.

Not a non-sequitur. The point is that AirBnB landlords are being singled out as though their apartments "belong" in some sense on the market, when nobody cares much about the million other ways real estate is re-purposed away from rentals. AirBnB is an easy target under the current legal framework, but it would be nice if we thought about the broader dynamics before going for the easy target. Hotels are a great example of an alternative: most NY hotels are actually converted apartment buildings. Every new hotel could be an apartment building instead. So... why don't those spaces "belong" in the rental market too?

Ultimately, if market forces make it more profitable for rooms to be used for short-term stays than as homes, it will be very hard to stop that from happening and not at all clear that we should stop it from happening. There are arguments the other way, but it is depressing to hear only the glib assumption that the free market must be stopped. For example, it's not ultra-obvious that policy should favor those who choose to live in Manhattan over those who choose to visit. Among other things, I think it's likely that the average income of the visitors is lower than that of whoever would be renting.

I guess all hotels are also guilty of "displacing New Yorkers" by re-purposing perfectly good real-estate for the benefit of "tourists"?

"Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of [atypical sex]."

If the "simplistic" male/female binary explains >99% of observations, there does not seem to be a strong case for describing biological sex as a "spectrum"...

I am 10,000% behind tolerance and acceptance for people of all genders and sexes and orientations, and it's very useful to understand how much biological complexity and variation is possible. But... any honest interpretation of the data would suggest that "the idea of two sexes" is an highly accurate approximation for Homo sapiens.

Ugh, this apology seems lamely antiseptic. "We are reviewing our notification procedures" is not the level of self-abasement I would expect after a mistake this serious.

Could someone weigh in on the following quote? Sounds fishy / wrong to me:

To put this in perspective, a balloon that is one kilometer in diameter is capable of lifting about 700,000 tons, or the weight of two Empire State Buildings. Add a second balloon of the same size and the lift capacity of these two balloons increases exponentially: it’s now capable of supporting nearly 6 million tons of weight.

I really appreciate your response, but I think there is a problem with our mental model of a moral paragon.

Is it really smart to believe that childlike simplicity of purpose is morally admirable? That never being seen to take a side in an ugly situation with horrible tradeoffs on all sides is a prerequisite for being a top quality "good person"?

My sense is that rather than courageous, it is extremely easy to take sides like opposing torture in all forms at all times. Such positions receive automatic praise and require little complex thinking. That does not necessarily make them wrong, but we should subject them to an extra shade of rational skepticism.

Relatedly, it is obvious to me that when Ronco takes a pro-torture position, it is not out of personal weakness or malice, as people seem to imagine, but could only be the result of serious careful thought. A sociopath, for example, would never ever take a position so likely to garner knee-jerk criticism for no personal gain. I suppose a troll might, but he is extremely obviously not a troll.

It is uncharitable and silly to believe that a good person could not have those positions in good faith. You may disagree with it, but "torture is sometimes permissible" is not an evil opinion held exclusively by evil people.

What you're saying is only true if you assume the existence of a modern test-prep mentality. Do the applicants know in advance which facts they will be asked to regurgitate, or do they need to understand a wide variety of material at this level of detail?

Also, I really do not agree that the math sections are easy. Students applying for non-quantitative majors are definitely not required to be able to produce non-trivial geometric proofs like this.

Yeah, the strength of field that would literally destroy molecules is a ridiculously loose upper bound.

Without saying anything about the broader thrust of an argument, I'll highlight a pet peeve: the drawing of wildly overconfident conclusions from social science research.

The economics experiment on how rural Indian farmers respond to financial incentives is interesting, but... is it really applicable here? How solid is the unstated assumption that elite CEOs have similar ability to perform under pressure as random subsistence farmers? Doesn't sound that solid to me...

If we stipulate that the charter schools in question have strong selection biases in their student bodies and better resources relative to public schools, then:

a) It's true that statistics are frequently misused by journalists and advocates, BUT:

b) It hardly impugns the schools themselves. Taking a subset of more promising students without behavioral issues out of failing public schools and giving them better resources at charters is not necessarily a bad idea.

Maybe, but I would wait to hear from a physicist. When I was a student, one of the most important papers one year was about a dark matter (WIMP) detector that failed to find anything, thus "trimming the parameter space" for what the particles might look like. If this is a genuine clue, it's probably very exciting.

The year-long isolation seems to me like a much crueler part of the ordeal than anything food related. We consider it inhumane to do this to convicted murderers, even when they have interactions with guards and activity time that make them much less isolated than "Nasubi" seems to have been.

This is one example of a number of ways the article is weirdly disingenuous. Thea author compares returns to equities but risks to nothing, as you point out. Separately, when he cites an estimate of 3.01% annual return from alpha and 4.62% from beta, all he has to say is that "most" of the returns are from beta and that fees are high, pretending not to understand that returning 3% per year due to alpha after fees would actually be quite impressive and valuable.

The gap between the US and the rest of the West is clearly (if you look at the charts) closing due to rapid catch-up growth from the others, not decline in the US.

Wouldn't it be kind of odd if the rest of the developed world did not catch up to US lifestyle standards with the spread of technology and capital?

I assume he will do this as himself, and not as "Stephen Colbert"?

And keep in mind that facilities fees often go to highly profitable outpatient facilities owned by the doctors.

That is quite a distinction!

Interesting: approximately half of this (my) cohort's children do not live with married parents.

EDIT: Even more interesting, 41% of single (living alone) women at 27 have a child.

To summarize a sentiment I see underlying some of the "conservative" positions on HN on Eich: all of us who are pro gay marriage (me very much included[0]) might want to think pretty carefully about the political culture we want to create.

Regardless of how exceptional and crystal-clear this moral issue is, if we accept personal attacks against political opponents, we are clearly "upping the ante" and creating a huge chilling effect against honest dialogue. Somewhere in the vicinity of 50% of the US holds the immoral view here, and if we believe they deserve shunning and serious personal consequences, then we are... well, pretty aggressive.

Even if aggression is warranted, are we sure we want a culture tolerant of this much political aggression? You might be in the wrong 50% next time, and unfortunately there may not be a way to create a culture tolerant of aggression only by those who are morally right / agree with us.

Clearly none of Eich's fundamental rights are violated here, but that still doesn't mean we should want to "go there".

[0] You can see from the very high volume of statements like this how scared people are to be associated with the wrong side here.