temujin

Fraud prevention actually is a security issue. Not an Internet security issue, so mistakes aren't punished that quickly, but the analogy is still sound.

The problem is, once the government chooses to not close a known loophole, the number of people who exploit it may increase by orders of magnitude. Without a willingness to add the other 1350 pages, you may end up with something like 70% fraud prevention, not 99.9%.

What's needed is more refactoring. This would benefit from more capacity to try different sets of regulations in parallel.

* Just within the last 50 years, we've made a ton of progress on this "impossible problem". By any reasonable measure, global poverty has been cut by at least half. Keep in mind that both China and India each still have larger populations than the entire continent of Africa, and that the median Chinese and the median Indian were not in significantly better shape than the median African 50 years ago. Furthermore, some African leaders, most notably Rwanda's Paul Kagame, are now achieving some success at adapting Asian development patterns to their own conditions.

* Taiwan and South Korea did not need draconian one child policies, or any other form of population control, to become prosperous. And they've gotten much further than China. Of all the lessons you could draw from East Asia's rise, "copy the one child policy" is close to the most nonsensical. I won't deny the obvious fact that you can't sustainably have each generation be 5 times larger than the previous one, but we have tons of data points indicating that women's education, and other things you'd want to do anyway to facilitate economic development, happen to solve the "unsustainable fertility rate" problem as a side effect, and the causal mechanisms are fairly well understood (when women are permitted to do other things with their lives than serve as full-time brood mares, most of them take advantage of the additional options...).

In practice, the question is if getting to X+n:Y is more than ten times as expensive as getting to X+(n/2):Y+(n/2), does it still make sense to prioritize the former?

This is not an argument against the "Hidden Genius Project" discussed in the linked article; it's clear that Mr. Young's comparative advantage does in fact lie with helping other black men, so you'd still want him working on that even if the broader goal is getting to X+(n/2):Y+(n/2).

Most economists agree that Lee Kuan Yew did a better job at increasing his people's prosperity than almost every other developing-country leader of his era. An increasing number of African leaders (Rwanda's Paul Kagame is an especially vocal example) see him as a primary role model.

You are free to believe that LKY's worldview was totally inaccurate and that he owes his success to a ridiculous amount of luck. (As you note, his views on human group differences were not a random eccentricity, they had a major impact on his policy choices in several domains.) Fortunately, those who are doing the most to increase African prosperity today reject your position, and tens of millions of people are benefiting.

It appears that you consider, among other things, Singapore's rise over the last 50 years to be "evil". This puts you at odds with practically the entire economics profession, and just about everyone else in the world trying to actually improve conditions in poor countries instead of burning perceived witches and warlocks.

In the repeated game of life, you can end up ahead if, by forswearing extreme cruelty toward others even when it's locally "efficient", you significantly reduce the probability of others behaving so cruelly toward you. This is a major reason civilization exists at all.

It is not unreasonable to believe that someone who is used to being exceptionally cruel to animals, when it is not terribly expensive to avoid that cruelty, will on average be more willing than usual to be cruel towards other humans. "Avoid hurting beings that can experience pain" is arguably a more compelling Schelling point to organize 21st century civilization around than "avoid hurting other humans, but do whatever the hell you want to other species". I disagree with Wiblin about this being a "no-brainer", but I mostly agree with his final judgment of the desirability of phasing out this type of factory farming.

Better representations are already used for downstream data analysis and continue to be improved; see e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.08452 .

However, algorithms for producing variant calls from raw sequencer output are also improving over time, and the way to get the most benefit from them is to save the old raw data so newer algorithms can be applied to them. That's where the storage challenges come into play.

Unfortunately, WW1 indicates that trade is at most secondary in importance in keeping the peace.

The efficient, egalitarian solution to poverty is improvement of the home countries, not open borders. This is most obvious for China; that country has so many people that if one attempted to "solve Chinese poverty" via brute force importation of their people, the entire First World would have flipped to a Chinese majority. Instead, Chinese poverty is being solved more than an order of magnitude more efficiently and less disruptively--this is a thing that is actually happening, not spherical-cow theorizing--via trade, technology transfer, and related methods.

Open borders may still have merit (I'd certainly value the additional convenience), but your argument for it is obviously wrong.

In the US, yes. In China, not so much.

For all the correlations which are greatly attenuated in China, it is safe to conclude that inequality is not a significant cause of the corresponding phenomenon; instead, causation goes the other direction and/or a third factor causes both.

(2007)

I can't believe there is no mention of Ready Player One in this article.

By definition, somebody has to have a most heavily locked door in the world.

In your analogy, it's clear to me that the US is better suited for that status than any of the other realistic candidates.

As for your restatement, it no longer has anything to do with immigration policy, since there are plenty of "high level" Chinese native employees at Chinese companies. I'd also choose unemployment over a low-level job at a place like Walmart.

> On the other hand, what would exit from a country without another country to go to mean?

Ordinary self-interest and the existence of >200 independent countries make it very likely that someone who just wants to be a contributor to any country that'll take him/her will find somewhere to go, even if it's not his/her first choice. Refugee treaties cover the corner case.

> We're debating morality here, which is subjective, but I'm not stupidly deontological. If open borders leads to a world which I rank lower morally than a world without then restrictive borders it is.

Then the argument is over, at least for the next decade or two. Sweden's experience provides the last bit of evidence necessary to demonstrate that open borders policy, as currently understood, leads to worse outcomes in Western countries than more moderate immigration policy.

I support research into better implementations of open borders, and if people like you act quickly, it might not be too late to correct e.g. Sweden's worst mistakes and arrive at something simultaneously more open and more functional there than current US policy. But this cannot be morally done without citizen consent, and you have no chance of getting that in the US in the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, I'll do what I can to help Chinese live better lives back in their home country, and I encourage others to do the same for India and other poor countries. And I'll vote for free trade and related policies. Because those courses of action, unlike open borders, are actually effective at reducing global poverty today.

> An uncharitable interpretation, I'm quite happy where I'm working too but I'd still rather be unemployed in the US than in India.

You wrote employed in China vs. unemployed in the US, not unemployed in [China/India] vs. unemployed in the US. You're now backtracking, as you should.

This has nothing to do with exit, and suggesting otherwise implies bad faith on your part. (The exception is if you've literally never read anything like the remainder of this paragraph. In that case, you can demonstrate good faith by admitting here that your argument was faulty, and countering similar faulty "exit" arguments from open borders advocates in the future.) You can leave your job at any time, but when you do so you can't require another company to hire you, and it's blindingly obvious that changing this state of affairs would destroy some of the best companies. Right of exit, which I support, is protected by refugee treaties and free world military power. A huge wave of unskilled immigration is practically certain to weaken the US enough to increase, not reduce, the number of places like North Korea that are outside the US's military reach.

And your "Chinese or Indian citizen" example actually counters your own argument. Both countries have far too many people for the US to absorb, and both have also succeeded for the last three decades at raising living standards for their native people by more than would be possible via any achievable amount of brute-force migration to the US (though they have a lot more to do). Chinese and Indian "right to pursue happiness" has very little to do with US mass immigration policy; trade policy, technology transfer, Pax Americana, and the like have been far more relevant for a long time.

And even your "extreme example" fails spectacularly. I am Chinese, I voluntarily work for a Chinese-owned company, I've spent most of the last four years in and next to Shenzhen, and these years have been very good to me.

With all that said, I do support loosening restrictions on migration when doing so is actually positive-sum, and I think Chinese and Indian student immigration to the US frequently qualifies. But right now there's no way to push for that without simultaneously pushing for far-more-negative-sum policies.

It's way more asymmetric than that. The US government is in a better position to work for Americans' interests than those of foreigners; the Mexican government has a comparative advantage in working for Mexican citizen interests, etc. Just like how you are better at spending money for yourself than for others (and the Soviet Union collapsed largely because it tried to ignore this law of nature).

All existing proposals by the open borders crowd for the US with political traction are severely negative-sum for this reason. (I've seen a few ideas from them which are not, but they have essentially zero chance of being implemented.) If one wants to devote themselves to helping foreigners today, there are far, far better ways, like training/employing them in their home countries, or working toward constructive political change there.

I've followed a similar path for the last three years, and it has worked out very well for me so far. I don't even want to think about how low the odds were of getting initial funding for my side project through the usual grant system; but now, thousands of academics depend on what I've built.

An alternative to freelancing is a not-too-demanding day job that you enjoy, and which is sufficient to pay the bills. It was good enough for Albert Einstein...

Although I was able to get around the Great Firewall while living in Shenzhen and Beijing, connection speed/quality was bad enough that more than tripling my rent to live in HK was easily worth it for Internet alone.

Quality of service matters, not just existence of service. There's a reason why lots of engineering effort goes into reducing latency. When the user is in China and the website is hosted outside, the Great Firewall negates all that effort.

Thanks a lot for this work, btw; I found your labor of division blog posts last year and integrated your code into my permutation generation logic, to very nice effect.

I seriously don't understand why so many people don't habitually use braces there...

  if (...) {
    goto fail;
  }
  if (...) {
    goto fail;
    goto fail;
  }
  if (...) {
    goto fail;
  }

tada, not actually a bug!

(2002)

"If you are writing multithreaded programs, you _will_ have locks, period."

Not necessarily. In scientific computing, it is common to encounter "embarrassingly parallel" scenarios where each thread can solve equal-sized chunks of the problem, and you can wait till all threads have terminated to collect results.

edit: Okay, the final wait is usually implemented with a lock under the hood. Nevertheless, this type of program is straightforward to reason about.

I was born during the Cold War, but I'm capable of understanding that

(i) when the government failed to give Bradley Manning due process, they forfeited the moral right to criticize Snowden for fleeing. Daniel Ellsberg is in a better position to comment on this than just about anyone else; here's what he said (http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-07-07/opinions/40427... ):

"Yet when I surrendered to arrest in Boston, having given out my last copies of the papers the night before, I was released on personal recognizance bond the same day. Later, when my charges were increased from the original three counts to 12, carrying a possible 115-year sentence, my bond was increased to $50,000. But for the whole two years I was under indictment, I was free to speak to the media and at rallies and public lectures. I was, after all, part of a movement against an ongoing war. Helping to end that war was my preeminent concern. I couldn’t have done that abroad, and leaving the country never entered my mind.

There is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon’s era — and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment — but are today all regarded as legal (including an attempt to 'incapacitate me totally').

I hope Snowden’s revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado.

He would almost certainly be confined in total isolation, even longer than the more than eight months Manning suffered during his three years of imprisonment before his trial began recently. The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture described Manning’s conditions as 'cruel, inhuman and degrading.' (That realistic prospect, by itself, is grounds for most countries granting Snowden asylum, if they could withstand bullying and bribery from the United States.)

Snowden believes that he has done nothing wrong. I agree wholeheartedly. More than 40 years after my unauthorized disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, such leaks remain the lifeblood of a free press and our republic. One lesson of the Pentagon Papers and Snowden’s leaks is simple: secrecy corrupts, just as power corrupts."

(ii) when they forced down the Bolivian presidential plane, they forfeited the moral right to criticize Snowden for staying in Russia.

Exactly. I would not have objected to Manning receiving multiple life sentences for his violation of the law, if due process had been respected. But it wasn't.

In his defense of Snowden's decision to flee the country, Daniel Ellsberg elaborates more on what's different between now and when he made the decision not to flee in 1971.

At minimum, due to the failure of due process in the Bradley Manning case, Snowden is entirely immune to criticism for his choice to leave the country. And after the Bolivian presidential plane was forced to land, he gained immunity to criticism for staying in Russia. Anyone who fails to concede these points is in possession of a malfunctioning brain and/or does not have the interests of the American people at heart.

This is oversimplified. In many cases, it is the conjunction of a reasonably strong prior belief and the absence of preexisting "proof" that motivates a scientist (or mathematician) to try to prove something in the first place.

The key is to perform proper Bayesian updates in the face of evidence in either direction; if you do, as long as your prior wasn't totally insane it doesn't really matter where you started.

Speaking of genome sequencing, if "immutable" and problematic group differences exist, genome sequencing is a crucial step toward making them mutable. (And if they do not exist, genome sequencing will help establish that.)

Zhang is married.