the Tesla auto-driver accident was truly an accident. I didn't realize it was a semi crossing the divider and two lanes to hit him.

https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/misfortune

This comment got 6+ responses, but none that actually attempted to answer the question. My goal of Socratically prompting contrarian thinking, without being explicitly contrarian myself, apparently failed. So here is my version:

• Most startups are gimmicky and derivative, even or especially the ones that get funded.
• Working for a startup is like buying a lottery ticket: a small chance of a big payoff. But since humans are by nature risk-averse, this is a bad strategy from a utility standpoint.
• Startups typically do not create new technology; instead they create new technology-dependent business models.
• Even if startups are a good idea in theory, currently they are massively overhyped, so on the margin people should be encouraged to avoid them.
• Early startup employees (not founders) don't make more than large company employees.
• The vast majority of value from startups comes from the top 1% of firms, like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple. All of those firms were founded by young white males in their early 20s. VCs are driven by the goal of funding the next Facebook, and they know about the demographic skew, even if they don't talk about it. So if you don't fit the profile of a megahit founder, you probably won't get much attention from the VC world.
• There is a group of people (called VCs) whose livelihood depends on having a supply of bright young people who want to jump into the startup world. These people act as professional activists in favor of startup culture. This would be fine, except there is no countervailing force of professional critics. This creates a bias in our collective evaluation of the culture.

Say you are a strong believer and advocate for the Silicon Valley startup tech culture, but you want to be able to pass an Ideological Turing Test to show that you are not irrational or biased. In other words, you need to write some essays along the lines of "Startups are Dumb" or "Why You Should Stay at Your Big Company Job". What kind of arguments would you use?

Is there any precedent of a state going from direct election to something more like the electoral college for selection of a governor?

The same can be done with addition of complex probability amplitudes, which is more exactly true in the sense that we are sure it is properly linear,

QM is linear, but you cannot take a snapshot of probability amplitudes.

Masha Gessen: Perfect Rigour: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century

This is a story about one person, but there is a lot of background information on doing math in Soviet Union.

Ok, I have to hold my breath as I ask this, and I'm really not trying to poke any bears, but I trust this community's ability to answer objectively more than other places I can ask, including more than my weak weak Google fu, given all the noise:

Is Sanders actually more than let's say 25% likely to get the nod?

I had written him off early, but I don't get to vote in that primary so I only just started paying attention. I'm probably voting Libertarian anyway, but Trump scares me almost as much as Clinton, so I'd sleep a little better during the meanwhile if it turns out I was wrong.

Thanks in advance. If this violates the Politics Commandment I accept the thumbs, but I'd love to also hear an answer I can trust.

Well, we could find a country that is not particularly competent overall, but was very competent and innovative in one specific civilizational subfield.

Soviet Russia did very well with space and nukes. On the other hand, one of the reasons it imploded was that it could not keep up doing very well with space and nukes.

I think the correlation you're talking about exists, but it's not that strong (or, to be more precise, its effects could be overridden by some factors).

There is also the issue of relative position. Brain drain is important and at the moment US is the preferred destination of energetic smart people from all over the world. If that changes, US will lose much of it's edge.

I used to think that Soviet Union was worse in economy, but at least better at things like math. Then I read some books about math in Soviet Union and realized that pretty much all mathematical progress in Soviet Union came from people who were not supported by the regime, because the regime preferred to support the ones good at playing political games, even if they were otherwise completely incompetent. (Imagine equivalents of Lysenko; e.g. people arguing that schools shouldn't teach vectors, because vectors are a "bourgeoise pseudoscience". No, I am not making this one up.) There were many people who couldn't get a job at academia and had to work in factories, who did a large part of the math research in their free time.

There were a few lucky exceptions, for example Kolmogorov once invented something that was useful for WW2 warfare, so in reward he became one of the few competent people in the Academy of Science. He quickly used his newly gained political powers to create a few awesome projects, such as the international mathematical olympiad, the mathematical jurnal Kvant, and high schools specializing at mathematics. After a few years he lost his influence again, because he wasn't very good at playing political games, but his projects remained.

Seems like the lesson is that when insanity becomes the official ideology, it ruins everything, unless something like war provides a feedback from reality, and even then the islands of sanity are limited.

I'm not sure that X% better has a unit that's always the same.

But Tetlock implies that he doesn't have access to the comparison with the classified group

I don't think that's the case. It's rather that it's classified information that he can't reveal directly because it's classified.