terminlvelocity

I give even less credit to the media's understanding here. I suspect that they weren't intentionally draining the battery just to satisfy a test condition and instead were running through random permutations of user actions or something and making sure it didn't result in bugs/slow performance.

I suspect that the engineer's complaint was that running these tests would have the side effect of using up the phone's battery on things that the user did not initiate or knowingly consent to.

If Facebook wanted to test things on phones with low batteries, rather than intentionally drain the batteries first, I suspect that they'd just target phones that happened to have low batteries at the time. That could be troubling, but I'll reserve judgment until we have concrete evidence of that occurring.

You'd think that given their large userbase, they could design tests so that they have miniscule impact on individual users. It's still possible that this is a massive issue worthy of scandal, but until we know more information, I'll take secondhand information from a single disgruntled employee with a grain of salt.

The writing style does not change much, and I do find that it's taking me longer than usual to work my way through the book, especially since I'm very interested in the subject matter. That being said, there are some good nuggets of information a little further in. Understanding some of the patters that pop up in the causal scenarios he lays out and being able to think about these with a shorthand or graphically has changed the way I think about complex situations.

I really enjoyed hearing Judea Pearl being interviewed, as I am most of the way through "The Book of Why" and have learned a lot from it. I did feel that Sam steered the conversation a bit too much towards his favorite topics (like free will) and wish there was a bit more discussion of philosophy/history of science, but it was still a great listen.

I first learned of Judea Pearl by stumbling across the transcript of a talk he gave while I was researching DAGs: http://singapore.cs.ucla.edu/LECTURE/lecture_sec1.htm . The way he grounded his talk in the history of thought hooked me, and the talk serves as a good general overview for those deciding if they want to pick up the book.

I built a tool for generating graphviz graphs at http://dottask.mattboehm.rocks .

Once you get used to the controls, it's very quick and has a ton of useful features (including export to dot so that you can further customize things.)

If they wished to show the effects of the MID, I wish they would have started by comparing a renter vs. a homeowner that were in more similar circumstances.

Of course a family with 2 adults that are 10+ years older and waited a decade longer to have kids are going to be in a very different financial situation than a 26 year old single mom that makes 13% of the income of the couple. How does such an apples-to-oranges comparison remotely demonstrate that the MID is the "engine of American inequality?"

But perhaps the point is that the renter has no chance of escaping her current situation? The story of the homeowners proves that it is absolutely possible to do so. Recall that Asare grew up poor. While we don't know much about his wife's background, we do know that the two were also renters for years, before a nonprofit program helped them buy their first house.