"the geeks are generally worse, unless they make it an explicit optimization target, but there are a bunch of very competent sociopaths around, in the Venkatesh Rao sense of the word, which seem a lot more competent and empowered than even the sociopaths in other communities"

Are you combining Venkatesh Rao's loser/clueless/sociopath taxonomy with David Chapman's geek/mop/sociopath?

(ETA: I know this is not relevant to the discussion, but I confuse these sometimes.)

All the mathematicians quoted above can successfully write proofs that convince experts that something is true and why something is true; the quotes are about the difficulty of conveying the way the mathematician found that truth. All those mathematicians can convey the that and and the why — except for Mochizuki and his circle.

The matter of Mochizuki's work on the abc conjecture is intriguing because the broader research community has neither accepted his proof nor refuted it. The way to bet now is that his proof is wrong:

Professional mathematicians have not and will not publicly declare that "Mochizuki's proof is X% likely to be correct". Why? I'd guess one reason is that it's their job to provide a definitive verdict that serves as the source of truth for probabilistic forecasts. If the experts gave subjective probabilities, it would confuse judgments of different kinds.

There's now this post by GradientDissenter and this post by me.

Oh sorry, somehow I forgot what you wrote about Reginald Johnston before writing my comment! I haven't read anything else about Puyi, so my suspicion is just a hunch.

I read that article. I'm suspicious because the story is too perfect, and surely lots of people wanted to discredit the monarchy, and there are no apologists to dispute the account.

original source

Is there any high-quality, intelligent discussion on the internet about California's ballot measure about gerrymandering, Prop 50?

What am I to conclude about your values from the fact that you're moderately dominant in bed?

You claim that:

the government is [not] somehow stopping people from working more.

but also:

the Netherlands [...] has enacted part-time-friendly policies

I'm skeptical that both of these claims are straightforwardly true. Due to the nature of labor law, a policy that is friendly to shorter work-weeks will in practice also be unfriendly to longer work-weeks.

In particular, my uninformed guess is that a Dutch employer and employee seeking to formalize a 40-hour-per-week working arrangement will encounter obstacles or costs that wouldn't arise for a <35-hour-per-week arrangement. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.