The denominator isn’t fixed.
If you have a tool which does a good job at automatically generating a certain type of code, you should probably generate more of that type than you used to. This could easily balloon to 90% of your new code, but only replace a small amount of human coding. You seem to allude to this scenario when you talk about one-off scripts. Another example is automated tests.
During the last pandemic people were sometimes not allowed to wear reusable respirators, but required to drop down to N95. This is pretty strong evidence that people think they are weird.
Without disagreeing with the conclusion, I think this is a poor discussion of the pros and cons. The big con is weirdness points. That’s basically why people don’t do it. Probably if you articulate that it’s easy to see that it’s a win, but if you don’t articulate it...
Yes, they’re supposed to be more effective. I think this is emotionally difficult because it sounds like a Pascal’s Wager. Yes, you should invest at the prepper margin, but how far? How many other points are comparably far down the list? What should I do before this? Here’s a concrete point: if I have a beard and an N95, I will achieve more by shaving than by switching to a reusable mask. Shaving is pretty low cost (especially, conditionally shaving in the event of crisis), not a tradeoff with changing masks, but knowing to shave is important and competes with mental resources.
Here are two other advantages over paper masks: you say elsewhere that it is more cost effective than paper masks. If you are already committed to having a stock of masks, this makes it much less like a Pascal’s Wager and more of free lunch. And I suspect that they are more comfortable, which is important for actually using them.
I don’t think MZB or Breen ever lived in Oregon. They moved to Berkeley for grad school in the mid 60s and except for some time on the east coast, lived in the Bay Area for the rest of their lives.
The points about IQ seem parochially American, not applicable to the rest of the West. But aren’t you British, not American? Does this really seem so central in Britain?
Until quite recently, modification of dogs was to make them specialized workers. The teacup poodle was created as a pet, but the standard poodle was created for duck hunting. That doesn’t seem a terrible fate.
I don’t see how usefulness explains which animals were bred frivolously. I guess the long experience breeding dogs for work could turn into breeding dogs for appearance, but in the 19th century there was frivolous breeding of pigeons, which had previously been bred for food.
The Scottish fold and (American) Persian cat were directly selected for appearance and their health problems are directly related to that feature. Maine coons seem to be natural (“landrace”). Their sixth toes and health problems might be the result of a population bottleneck 400 years ago, or the rapid selection for a new environment, but they were brought for work. I don’t know about their friendliness. It makes sense that someone would breed for that for pets, but I don’t think that’s what happened. Rag dolls going limp when held seems disturbing to me. The one I met seemed more frozen with fear than happy with humans.
You had a lot of sources in this post. Half of them are only about ownership, because that’s easy to measure. Do you believe them? If not, why cite them? If so, then why not talk about mere ownership?
But the other half are even less believable because control isn’t measureable. Good governance is good. But how can you even classify governance as democratic? Are the Southwest town halls democratic? Or are they classified as democratic because the writer like the company?
Your previous post mentioned a lot of pitfalls, but I don’t think the United example fell into any of them. And I don’t think they are important. Most employee stock is voting shares, but there are so few votes it hardly matters. What is important the large number of small decisions.
You start by talking about democratic governance, but then switch to firm ownership. Employee ownership is easy to measure, but does it actually result in information flows? Some people insist that there is a big difference.
To see the difference between merely giving stock and letting workers shape their destiny, look at the airline industry. In return for lower wages in 1994, United Airlines pilots and mechanics got more than half the company’s stock. But life inside the cockpit and at loading ramps barely changed. By contrast, Southwest Airlines employees own only about 11% of the company’s stock, but the company works to encourage and implement workers’ suggestions, in part through town hall-style forums with top management. While there are other important differences between the carriers, workplace culture is a big reason United posted record losses last year while Southwest made a healthy profit–as it has for 29 years.
Southwest had good governance. Did this have any connection to distributed equity? How?
Anyhow, from a theoretical perspective, owning 1/1000 of the firm while having 1/1000 of the responsibility is pretty big free rider problem. If you can make your small part of the firm more efficient, it won’t show up in your equity. But just being an employee is theoretically a big incentive to keep the firm surviving. The 1/1000 of the equity seems negligible compared to that.
There is value figuring out what is going on in America. But since the same thing is going on elsewhere, answers unique to America are incorrect.
Focusing on the US seems like a mistake, since Dominic Cummings worked in the UK, yet the situation seems to be substantially worse, despite, eg, there being no separation of powers.
How to find workers that will do with Dominic Cummings wants? He found it quite easy to recruit from people already employed by the Department. He didn’t need a lot. He couldn’t manage a lot. If the masses had ignored him, it would have been fine, but they actively sabotaged. And lots of people he found productive left because it was too difficult.
When you step into a liquor store, the majority of the alcohol you see will likely be sold to people whose health it’s significantly harming
This does not follow and is probably not true. Heavy drinkers tend to consume low-profit cheap forms, often highly concentrated. Most of visible inventory is advertising diversity and trying to get moderate drinkers to buy something more expensive.
I’m not sure how relevant this is to the rest of the argument, but I see people assert that this is true and relevant all the time and I must rebut.
The default on Polymarket is no expiration. It is only after actively choosing to have an expiration date that it goes to 1 day. I suspect that is so short that it encourages people not to choose it. Similarly, the default with Manifold is not expiring. But if you do click to change, it offers 5 options from immediate to 1 month.
Both sites encourage market orders over limit orders. Polymarket makes limit orders visible but not default. Manifold buries them under “advanced.” So the people Joern profited off of were sophisticated enough to choose the “advanced” options but not sophisticated enough to choose good expiration dates.
Encouraging people to use limit orders is a step in the direction of a smoother market. Limit orders with 1 month expiration are somewhat like a sequence of monthly auctions. But they may be harder to understand and require more UI work.
That makes it sound like there’s a lot of room for big improvements from small changes. Like just add expiration dates to limit orders. Then have the UI suggest reasonable dates. Maybe 1⁄2 of the time remaining. In an absolute sense that is a very long time, but surely it is better for almost all users than the status quo of all of the time remaining.
To what extent do these arguments apply to the stock market? Has any stock market tried this? Why didn’t the people complaining about HFT who founded IEX do this? Is this legal (eg, compliant with NBBO)? Even if it isn’t legal in America, lots of countries have their own stock markets and could try this or even impose it.
But John is also flinching away from acting on his disgust. He is not communicating it to the other people.
There are several separate issues here. First, the people saying that you would have compassion if you understood them are lying. Second, you are bad at understanding people. Do you understand cats, or do you just condescend to them?
Your disgust is not productive. It is not helping you deal with the people. Your solution to this problem is to flinch away from reality. Maybe understanding people is is not worth the effort, but flinching away is not making a calculation. It sounds like you are wallowing in your ineptitude. Maybe you could learn something about yourself by comparison.
Or maybe the disgust reaction is productive: maybe it is a fear of contagion, that you can’t understand them without becoming them.
What is the metaphysical status of a title? How can you tell if a story has a title? Stories don’t have metadata. Blog posts do have metadata and it was the title field of the blog post. The story definitely doesn’t have any other title. If the title field had been “a story,” people would assert that it was untitled. Yes, it was a prefatory remark building context, but that isn’t disqualifying from being a title.
If you want to steer results, you have to keep an eye on your effects. You need closed-loop control. This is true at all levels of a system. In particular, once you have created a system, you have to pay attention to whether it is achieving its goal, or whether it needs to be redesigned. If you aren’t doing that, you are doing a lousy job steering. You don’t have as much optimization power as might appear at first glance. Or maybe you are doing that, but for some other goal.
I was really impressed by the Kevin Simler tweet (n) that everything that exists is because of a positive feedback loop. It persists because it plays some role in renewing itself. You could call that positive feedback the purpose of the structure. Some things come into existence and then just wind down, failing to gain any traction. For those it is hard to isolate a purpose distinct from that of the creator. But for things that persist, they have not just one creator, but myriad forces that renew them. The purpose of the system is not what it does, but what it does that contributes to its continuing existence. I think this meaningfully distinguishes partial successes from implicit goals. The bus system emitting CO2 does not produce buses next year. Successfully transporting people does. It also creates jobs. If these jobs are form a coherent lobby, they may contribute to the existence of the system, in contrast to the CO2.
The image is broken. I put it here. source