the_grue

Can anyone explain the findings? A quick google of 'excess burden' term didn't yield a clear definition, there is a similar term in taxation, but that seems unrelated.

I went that route on a school PC in 1998. There was no floppy drive, so I installed a Linux distro (also Slackware, iirc) onto the Windows partition, then resized the Windows partition with Partition Magic and used the existing Linux as a bootstrap for a fresh install on its own partition. It was so incredibly magical. No one had any idea I was doing it, and I felt part of the hacker culture :) I tinkered with it for a few of months at least, and eventually was compiling my own kernels, playing with boot/swap partitions, etc. Never got X to work, though.

I don't think you can reasonably conclude either that a) anti-vaxxer propaganda is effective insofar it attracts statistically significant number of new people under its bannder, or b) that FB blocking their pages effectively reverses the effect of (a).

Personally, I hold the opinion that anti-vaxxers are more of a natural product of their environments than anything else. You can clearly see the distinction along the religious and educational boundaries, for example. Limiting the freedom of speech in attempt to silence them is not going to work, like it's not working in stopping any other kind of speech you don't like. Censorship is dangerous: it alienates people and prevents communication, effectively radicalizing those affected.

Take a step back. Why did Moderna founders invest in research and technology? Are they selfless idealists? Probably not, at least that is not the only driving motivator. And even if they are, they still want the company to earn money in order to invest it into more research.

Bottom line is they want the company to be successful, so their long-term plan is to profit from making drugs. If they lived in a socialist economy where no such profit was possible, they would not have bothered, and then there would be no cure. If that is the world you prefer to live in, you have options (North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela currently, the rest having collapsed or transitioned to free market some time ago).

As far as I understand the term, white privilege means some kind of economical and political advantage of whites over other races. Meaning that the outcomes are different, depending on one's race. From a brief glimpse of the paper, it is quite clear that the authors push for equality of outcome and label their position as 'liberal'. However, many people disagree. The classical liberal position is granting every person equality of opportunity, saying nothing about equality of outcome. And for a good reason: you actually can't have both. Either everyone is equal at the start of the game and then the more successful achieve more, or everyone is equal at the end, and for that you have to make their opportunities unequal.

When you think about it this way, equality of outcome is essentially a Marxist rhetoric. So it's quite understandable why many people don't like politicians who advocate this controversial position.

If, the other hand, what politicians really want is a greater equality of opportunity, they really should make that clear. But I don't think they usually mean that, given that people who talk about white privilege are usually the ones who push for so-called 'affirmative action', which clearly reduces equality of opportunity in favor of equality of outcome.

I think a important advance is being able to build neural networks in a modular fashion by constructing a toolkit of components and techniques one can reasonably expect, when combined, to produce certain result. As the field advances, this toolbox will become richer and better defined and delineated, forming basic building blocks. Just like functions, loops and virtual methods came out of the chaos of assembly.

Same for Kotlin.

Hmm, your link has an author_access_token in it. Are you sure it's not linked to your or someone else's (author's?) account?

The article is behind the paywall, but it can be accessed through Sci-Hub. Some of the most interesting findings:

- 43% respondents did not agree with "Advocacy and research should be kept as separate as possible to protect the objectivity of the research".

- 45% respondents did not agree with "It is plausible that women's greater representation than men in people-oriented professions (social work, nursing, etc.) is due in part to a biological component".

- 31% respondents did agree with "It is not plausible to conclude that gender discrimination in the workplace has disappeared until men and women are (at least roughly) equally represented in virtually all occupational categories."

I'm using FF 56, since that's the last version to support the old extensions. Sorry, should've mentioned it.

Neither in Firefox...

Unfortunately, I really cannot begin to understand what you're talking about. What country is it in? What city? What kind of people are involved? What kind of jobs are that low-paying that two jobs are not enough to live? Why don't they move to a better place? So many questions. In any case, it's all anecdotal evidence, so is there a solid, unbiased study that describes this?

Actually, the poverty level doesn't continue to rise, it's been stable around 13.5% for the last 30 years. The reason why it stays that way instead of shrinking is probably related to the Pareto distribution problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcEWRykSgwE

I think JoeAltmaier is right on point. There are way more disadvantageous traits than skin color, and some of them are just as bad. E.g. having low IQ. It's just as unfixable as the skin color is and probably way worse. How about being much older than everyone else? That's quite a bad thing in a workplace, even if you're just as smart and capable. But even traits such as having AIDS, having a scar through one's face or even just having really bad teeth can be unfixable for many people. Then it's correct to ask the question: why would society as a whole place the skin color at the center of its attention?

In my opinion, humans are inherently xenophobic and suspicious of anything that is unfamiliar or an outlier. Evolution shaped us this way. So you cannot eradicate all the pain, fear and suffering caused by xenophobia, not by a long shot. People with negative traits (in other people's eyes) need to learn to live with them, and they do it all the time. I am not by any means arguing for racism, of course. We still need to teach that racism is bad, but at the same time we should ask ourselves: are we blowing this thing out of proportions? If we as a society are already near the point of maximum tolerance, then insisting on further corrective measures (such as so called "affirmative action", i.e. discrimination to groups seen as the oppressors) may make things worse for everyone by raising resentment and heating up the hate as opposed to reducing it.

> This is so ill-defined as to be useless.

The article you linked provides some quotes from Marx and Engels which argue that full equality along all dimensions can never be achieved. But this didn't stop all the implementations of Marxism in real life to still push the equity thing hard. So your argument is actually immaterial.

> That is, the outcome of the competition is, by and large, predetermined.

I disagree. The Western states have social lifts that are designed to allow people from low-income families to still be able to achieve high positions in society, given talent and hard work. Public schools, state-sponsored higher education, public health care, children services are examples of such lifts. If these systems do not work very well, then we should improve them as opposed to favoring a Black kid at the entry exam of university at the expense of an Asian kid who is just as smart. Because once we start discriminating and making preferences, it's very hard to stop.

Especially when the problem we're trying to solve by throwing resources at is not the real problem. E.g. some Black communities have a very particular set of problems absent in other communities, for example MUCH higher rate of single-parenthood than in any other community with similar income in the USA. 73% children in Black families are born out of marriage. Clearly, it's a cultural thing. You can't solve these problems by throwing money at them, money actually can make it worse. So we need to have an honest conversation about the real problems our communities are facing instead of following a blanket "all the people are exactly equal, so every group at the bottom of the hierarchy must be discriminated against" approach.

> I also think it's disingenuous to claim what "equity" is.

The definition I gave is the one widely used in academic disciplines such as "black studies", "gender studies", "women studies" and "whiteness studies". I did not invent it. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_equity_(Canada)

> Some groups are making hard stands for calling for equity

I'm not sure which groups are calling for what, but the 20th century experience is clear: Marxism doesn't work. So identity politics should be resisted as much as possible, irrespective of who's calling for it.

> And bringing Marxism is guaranteed for a shitstorm..

If I didn't do a very good job of arguing why I consider it Marxism, perhaps Jordan Peterson explains it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqcRVmOpIbY

As to causing a shitstorm - I believe that's inevitable when you have an honest discussion on such an important and divisive topic. That doesn't mean such a discussion should be avoided, on the contrary - the more difficult and divisive the topic is, the more important it is to discuss it openly, so that each side may argue their positions as best as they can and hopefully advance towards solution that works for everyone involved.

Well, I was talking about jokes. I do agree that people were more careful about voicing serious dissent, but then who actually did that? A very small handful of political activists, the rest just never went there, because a) usually their friends and family already agreed with them about politics b) everyone felt powerless to change anything c) everyone was too preoccupied with survival in the tough Soviet reality.

It sounds like you're trying to disprove an argument I never made. Let me be clear about this: there was no free speech in the USSR and you couldn't sound criticism publicly.

But some assume that the absence of free speech means that everyone is either brainwashed or so terrified they are afraid to speak their minds at home. I just had to point out this is not how it was in the late USSR.

Protesting publicly is one thing. Talking in your own kitchen is another. I guess some unlucky people got busted for that, but generally it was safe, as long as no one deliberately ratted you out (which didn't happen much since Stalin died). And even then, circumstances needed to be really hard against you.

Also, it obviously matters what it is you're saying. Most people just told jokes about the communist regime and talked about how shitty life was. Nobody cared about that as long as they kept it private.

Well, I was born in the 80's, so I only witnessed that. However the famous Soviet "kitchen conversations" existed even before that.

Yeah, that is the only place where waves are mentioned. I don't know whether the author of the article even realized that was a reference to the wave-particle duality.

Are you talking out of experience or just theorizing? Because I was there. People were telling Gorbachov & Reagan jokes all the time in their kitchens, that was just a normal part of life.

The article doesn't do justice to the hilarious reference to the wave-particle duality that Kuryohin makes when he equates mushrooms to radio waves. This is the part that still makes me giggle when I recall this prank.

No, this is totally not how it was. People used to speak quite freely at home (aside from when Stalin was in power, and even then).

> then it just doesn't even apply

Then you don't seem to have an argument against Hanlon's razor?

> Hanlon setting up malice and stupidity as an exclusive or gate, is not

In this case, clearly, the two explanations are incompatible: either Putin planned the world to discover that he was lying about the assassination, etc., etc., or he did not.

> brings back museum quality amphorae

That's a completely different class of lies. That one is a bravado that shows the level of intelligence he assumes in his fans, nothing more. He certainly didn't risk getting himself into another cold war by fishing out those amphorae!

> People are very good at acting dumb to avoid blame.

That clearly didn't work in that case, did it?

> Hanlon's razor is a method of being polite, rather than a robust logical position.

Hanlon's razor is related to Occam's razor: in case there are two competing theories about the world, one of which is complicated and the other simple, always prefer the simple one. Neither is a logical argument, both are abductive heuristics [1] intended to produce the most likely explanation. Can it be played? It can, but it's even more unlikely, as that would further increase the level of sophistication. You can't rely on Hanlon's razor in a game of chess between two grandmasters, but the real world has a few crucial differences from chess, for example the fact that no player can realistically contain every possible interaction of their actions with other forces' actions. Which is why nobody is willing to bet on making such stupid and dangerous mistakes on purpose as exposing your agents, exposing your leader's lies and making your country suffer retribution for assassination on foreign soil. And for what? To laugh the whole world in the face? That's insane.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning

> Are you channeling H. L. Menken?

I don't know who that is. But if I am channeling anyone, that would be R.J. Hanlon, who said "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

That would be way too subtle for the common folk. Whatever GRU's plan was, in reality most Russian people just take it at face value: Russian spies got exposed, Putin's lie got exposed, the spies put on a miserable show on TV, and now even their true identities have been exposed (only one so far, but I expect the other one to be exposed soon, too). That's a failure.

I'm pretty sure you're reading way too much into it because you've been told Putin (and, by extension, his subordinates) was a great tactician one step ahead of everyone else. I never believed it and I don't believe it now.