I actually think of Chesterton's fence argument as a rhetorical move. I imagine that some hypothetical "Alice" says, "I can't see any reason for this", in order to force their opponent to justify something which was historically justified by values which are considered obsolete -- for instance, "I can't see any reason why same-sex couples should not marry". Well, Alice probably can see reasons, but if Alice gives those reasons, she is doing her opponent's job. If she instead says, "The only reason for this is bigotry,&...
while Democrats could run pretty much the same campaign in the primaries as well as the general election.
Democrats in fact differ between the primary and the general election. Off the top of my head, consider Obama's shift on FISA from 2007 (voted against) to post-primary 2008 (voted for telecom immunity).
I recently came across this, which seems to have some evidence in my favor (and some irrelevant stuff): http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/10/extraordinary-leader/
Well, it's not entirely unrelated, since jkaufman says:
Go is the most interesting of the three, and has stood up to centuries of analysis and play, but Dots and Boxes is surprisingly complex (pdf) and there used to be professional Checkers players.
The interest here is not provided by the complexity of the rules themselves, but by the complexity of solving the games (or, rather, playing them well, but this is probably related). One can easily imagine games with very complex rules that nonetheless admit simple strategies and are thus boring.
The right comparison is to compare that to how much you'd be bothered if you had to clean up the mess left by an incompetent coworker. Or having to deal with an incompetent bogon in middle management.
Unsurprisingly, I've had to deal with both of these things. It has never seemed to me that yelling at someone could make them more competent. Educating them, or firing them and replacing them seems like a better plan.
[Linus]: And I do it partly (mostly) because it's who I am, and partly because I honestly despise being subtle or "nice".
Steelman this. I am pretty sure that in the North European culture being "subtle or nice" is dangerously close to being dishonest. You do not do anyone a favour by pretending he's doing OK while in reality he's clearly not doing OK. There is a difference between being direct and blunt - and being mean and nasty.
I don't understand what you're saying here. Are you saying that anyone is proposing that Linus to act in...
Since OSS projects are easy to create and it's easy for developers to move from project to project
Creating projects is easy; forking is hard. And nobody wants to create a new kernel from scratch. Kernel hackers don't really have a lot of options. So I don't think your theoretical world has anything to do with the real world. Also, it seems to me that culture doesn't end up contained within a single project; Linux depends on GCC, for instance, so the Linux people have to interact with the GCC people. Which means that culture will bleed over. I was ...
Do you think we have a basic difference in values or there's some evidence which might push one of us towards the other one's position?
That's a pretty good question.
Hypothesis: I think some of it might be a case of the "Typical Mind Fallacy". Maybe if Linus yelled at you, you wouldn't be bothered at all. But I know that my day would be ruined, and I would be less productive all week. So I assume that many people are like me, and you assume that many people are like you.
I would be curious about a controlled experiment, where free/open sour...
I hope you didn't take my position to be that yelling at people is always the right thing to do. There certainly is lots of yelling which is stupid, unjustified, and not useful in any sense.
The issue is whether yelling can ever be useful. You are saying that no, it can never be. I disagree.
No, the issue is whether Linus's yelling is useful, or, whether yelling is generally useful enough in free/open source projects that it outweighs the costs. Specifically, whether "Let’s drive away people unwilling to adopt that “git’r'done” attitude with witheri...
Bill Gates failed to create an organization that would thrive in his absence. We'll see how Steve Jobs did in a few more years (it seems likely that he did better, but he also had the famous "reality distortion field", which Linus doesn't). Steve Jobs also got kicked out of his own company for a bunch of years.
touching the electric fence did not make me a more productive worker.
How do you know?
Well, I can tell you that afterwards, I felt like shit and didn't get much done for a while. Or I started looking for a new job (whether or not I ended up taking one, this takes time and mental energy away from my current job). And getting yelled at has never seemed to me to correlate with me actually being wrong, so I'm not clear on how it would have changed my behavior.
...I'm saying that it's not optimal.
How do you know? (other than in a trivial sense that any
Yes, I used to work for RMS; I am well aware of the difference. I should also note that most of the systems you mention use proprietary kernel modules; it would be better if they didn't, and perhaps if Linus's attitude were different, there would be more interest in fixing the problem.
Also, desktops are where I spend most of my time, so I think they still matter a lot.
Ahem. I think you mean to say that you never touched the electric fence. Doesn't mean the fence is not there.
No, I mean that touching the electric fence did not make me a more productive worker.
The fact that kernel development goes on and goes on pretty successfully is evidence that your concerns are overblown.
I'm not saying that Linus's style will inevitably lead to instant doom. That would be silly. I'm saying that it's not optimal. Linux hasn't exactly taken over the world yet, so there's definitely room for improvement.
The incentives include both carrots and sticks and sticks are punishments and are meant to be so. If you want to talk about carrots-only management styles, well, that's a different discussion.
For what it's worth, I've never worked at a place that successfully used aversive stimulus. And, since the job market for programmers is so hot, I can't imagine that anyone would willingly do so (outside the games industry, which is a weird case). This is especially true of kernel hackers, who are all highly qualified developers who could find work easily.
...I dis
I think it's pretty clear that Linus is more on the power-play end of the spectrum. Notice his comment above about the Android developer; that's not someone who is part of his microculture (the person in question was a developer on the Android email client, not a kernel hacker). And again, the shouting-as-punishment thing shows that Linus understands the effect that he has, but doesn't care.
Also, Linus, as the person in the position of power, isn't in a position to judge whether his culture is fun. Of course it's fun for him, because he's at the top. ...
Linux kernel seems to me a quite well-managed operation (of herding cats, too!) that doesn't waste lots of time on flame wars.
I don't follow kernel development much. Recently, a colleague pointed me to the rdrand instruction. I was curious about Linux kernel support for it, and I found this thread: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1173350
Notice that Linus spends a bunch of time (a) flaming people and (b) being wrong about how crypto works (even though the issue was not relevant to the patch).
Is this typical of the linux-kernel mailing list...
I'd pay $5/hour for someone to drive me almost anywhere if availability was coordinated by Uber, but not taxi prices... This looks to me like a barrier-to-entry, regulatory-and-tax scenario, not "Darn it we're too rich and running out of things for labor to do!"
Federal minimum wage has been falling relative to productivity for decades. Also, Australia has a much higher minimum wage than the US but a lower unemployment rate. They also don't have at-will employment, implying that the risks of hiring are larger. So I'm not sure the regulations are actually the problem here (that said, I oppose many of them anyway on various grounds).
Armen Alchian, the most powerful economist ever
... whom nobody has ever heard of? Like, he's not a Nobel prize winner or anything.
Also, isn't this post sort of meaningless? That is, doesn't it simply boil down to saying "everything is the way it is, and it couldn't be any other way"?
For instance, imagine that I walk by a $20 bill on the street (for the sake of argument, let's say that immediately after I walk by it, it's blown into a storm drain and destroyed). I miss it because I'm looking up in order to count air conditioners, which I'...
I was going to ask what you thought about http://www.certifiedhumane.com/ but it is completely fucking useless: "The Animal Care Standards for Chickens Used in Broiler Production do not require that chickens have access to range." So nevermind.
So instead I'll ask why a meaningful set of standards doesn't exist. http://www.globalanimalpartnership.org/ Step 5, maybe? Their web site sucks, because it doesn't give me a searchable list of products, but maybe they just need some help.
Anyway, this seems like it would be a way more effective thing fo...
This essay's thesis is that we should eat less meat, but its evidence is only that factory-farmed meat is a problem.
Most (but not all) of the meat I eat is not factory-farmed. The coop where I buy my meat says (pdf) that it buys only "humanely and sustainably raised" meat and poultry ... from animals that are free to range on chemical-free pastures, raised on a grass-based diet with quality grain used only as necessary, never given hormones and produced and processed by small-scale farmers." (For eggs, the coop does offer less-humane opti...
Niman Ranch claims to raise their animals humanely. Do they really?
The shareholders of Niman Ranch voted to reduce their standards to increase profits. As a result, Bill Niman (who originally founded the company) now refuses to eat their products, Wikipedia has more
This essay's thesis is that we should eat less meat, but its evidence is only that factory-farmed meat is a problem.
I only think factory-farmed meat is the problem. I use "eat less meat" as a shorthand, since nearly all meat is factory-farmed meat.
~
The coop where I buy my meat says (pdf) that it buys only "humanely and sustainably raised" meat and poultry
I definitely agree it's better to buy "humanely raised" meat and poultry than not "humanely raised" meat/poultry. And perhaps you have found a trustworthy ...
See among others: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_neoclassical_economics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase
More tendentiously, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-autistic_economics
(Edit: removed irrelevant bit)
I'm not a military historian (I'm not any kind of historian), but it strikes me that there are probably lots of examples of military planning which turned out to be for the wrong war or wrong technological environment. Like putting rams on ships in the late 19th Century:
No other ironclad was ever sunk by an enemy ship in time of war by the use of the ram, although the ram was regarded by all major navies for some 30 years as primary battleship armament. A number of ships were, however, rammed in peacetime by ships of their own navy.
On the other hand,...
Do you have a sense for the size of the threat that Y2K presented?
Some competing cost estimates. I tend towards the "fix it when it fails" side of things, but that is a tendency not a rule.
Albania spent billions of dollars on useless bunkers in case of an invasion.
Can you give a reference? Who did they anticipate potential invasion from?
Bunkers - invasion from the US or the USSR; cost was twice the Maginot Line, which Wikipedia elsewhere describes as 3 billion French Francs.
Why? Three possible reasons. First, the Brave New World Factor: Research cloning gives man too much power for evil. Second, the Slippery Slope: The habit of embryonic violation is in and of itself dangerous. Violate the blastocyst today and every day, and the practice will inure you to violating the fetus or even the infant tomorrow. Third, Manufacture: The very act of creating embryos for the sole purpose of exploiting and then destroying them will ultimately predispose us to a ruthless utilitarianism about human life itself.
All of t...
Some random examples:
Y2K mitigation.
Doris Lessing's "Report on the Threatened City" (I found it unreadable, so this is not a recommendation) points out that Californians live with the constant threat of a major earthquake. A big enough quake could kill millions, although a quake of that magnitude would be rather infrequent. In general, seismic, volcanic, and weather events are a matter of when, not whether, so perhaps this is not quite in the right reference class.
Albania spent billions of dollars on useless bunkers in case of an invasion.
Maybe this is the moment to ask why Hermione isn't already the hero of HP:MOR. If the point of HP:MOR is that someone who is smart and rational (and raised by smart/rational muggles) would immediately find a million holes in the Potter-verse, why not start with the character who is already known to be the smart one, and is at least a bit more rational than canon Harry? Sure, there's some issues with the prophesies -- but (rot13 for spoiler) Hayhaqha had a pretty good solution to that.
The indirection syntax should be rewritten to be left to right.
I don't actually think so. The final answer is simply f(g(h(x))), which is a perfectly normal thing to see in programming.
That said, I still think it's a bad test. It involves no reasoning whatsoever -- merely following instructions carefully. I'm a reasonably good programmer, but sometimes a bit sloppy (that's why I write tests). So, I ended up with the correct final answer but a wrong number in one of the boxes.
Well-calibrated means that your certainty matches your odds of correctness. Do we really think that Beatrice can make ten trillion statements of this form and have only one of them be wrong? Even if she uses "Bayesian" methods? Or, if you prefer the wagering approach -- do you really think she would bet at those odds?
Recall that in law, you're mostly dealing with people who have a problem. Yes, there is some transactional work, but it is usually either low-paying or at least somewhat adversarial. Will dealing with miserable people all day make you miserable? If so, skip law.
For programming, if you follow the path that LW recommends, you should be able to tell within a month or two whether you like it enough to continue.
I would be surprised to learn that market research pays well. I just Googled, and this was the first hit that had salary data. It's not terrible...
That's totally a big area, yes. And if it's what excites Chris, then he should totally go for it. But it isn't my first recommendation, because most mobile apps are written in Objective C or Java, while Chris has learned Python. There's a fairly large amount of new stuff that one has to learn to transition from Python to a statically typed language, so it's not the most efficient path to a working app.
(It doesn't feel that different if you have been programming for a while, especially if you learned a statically-typed language first, but you've probably forgotten about having to learn about covariance/contravariance/invariance, or about memory allocation, or about type-casting).
Learn a framework for developing web applications. Specifically, learn Django.
This is because most new applications are web applications, and because you can write a satisfying application without knowing much. Also, you get immediate feedback on your code -- you can see whether or not the app is coming out the way you want.
Django is recommended because (a) it is written in Python, (b) it is relatively popular, and (c) it is similar to Rails, which is very, very popular and thus easy to get hired for.
(in parallel with 1) Decide on an application tha
No, because it's possible that there genuinely is a possible total ordering, but that nobody knows how to figure out what it is. "No human always knows what's right" is not an argument against moral realism, any more than "No human knows everything about God" is an argument against theism.
(I'm not a moral realist or theist)