I was using it to describe my own comment. I’ll try to think of a way to make that clearer in the future.
wubbles
We are the Athenians, not the Spartans
Hello, my name is Watson. The username comes from my initials and a Left 4 Dead player attempting to pronounce them. I am a math student at UC Berkeley and a longtime lurker. I’ve got a post on rational investing, based on the conclusions of years of research by academic economists, but despite lurking I never realized there is a karma limit to post in discussion. I’m interested in just about everything, a dangerous phenomenon.
Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antionus Pius, Marcus Aurelius we all able and capable administrators, and their reign was largely peaceful. But then they were followed by Commodus. Benevolent dictatorship with succession by training and adoption was tried, and so long as it worked it worked. But the one failure was a pretty dramatic one, considered by some to be the start of the fall of the Roman Empire.
I’m not sure I agree with 9. There is a lot of SF out there, and some of it (Roadside Picnic, Stanislaw Lem’s works) presents the idea that the universe is inherently uncaring in a very real way. Anthropomorphization is not an inherent feature of the genre, and fiction might enable directly understanding these ideas in a way that argument doesn’t make real for some people.
Politics: an undervalued opportunity to change the world?
Smarter humans, not artificial intellegence
I think the problem with elite common sense is that it can be hard to determine whose views count. Take for instance the observed behavior of the investing public determined by where they put their assets in contrast with the views of most economists. If you define the elite as the economists, you get a different answer from the elite as people with money. (The biggest mutual funds are not the lowest cost ones, though this gap has narrowed over time, and economists generally prefer lower cost funds very strongly)
Things were a lot worse then everyone knew: Russia almost invaded Yugoslavia, which would have triggered a war according to newly declassified NSA journals, in the 1950′s. The Cuban Missile Crisis could easily have gone hot, and several times early warning systems were triggered by accident. Of course, estimating what could have happened is quite hard.
10% is the charitable giving limit. There is another thing to be asked about, and that is the impact of the job. If I were to be a tax lawyer, I would be directly harming the ability of the US government to spend on social welfare programs. If I worked on Wall Street anywhere but Vanguard I would be bilking people out of their life savings, and at Vanguard I wouldn’t be making $100 K a year. Someone working as a tobacco farmer to raise money for cancer research has some misplaced priorities.
I am interested! Note that zoning might make this hard, but maybe we could buy adjacent bungalows and reconfigure them. Wasn’t the bay supposed to be commune friendly?
Epistemic status: probably BS This could be a causal explanation for why engineers are seen as having poor social skills and the usefullness of ASD traits in engineering. If you aren’t sensitive to the productive conversations being bad socially, and so don’t disrupt them, you will learn more.
As for salons the fact that a hostess lead the conversation and selected the guests meant that the conversation had to be interesting to her. Those who didn’t have anything interesting to say, or disrupted interesting conversations, wouldn’t be invited back. Sadly wikipedia doesn’t say much about how they were run. They seem to also have selected books to read, which would steer the conversation towards those books.
Look at the cost of IVF: According to http://www.momjunction.com/articles/much-ivf-treatment-cost-india_0074672/ it is $450,000 Rs, which is $6,000 dollars. IVF is a prerequisite for the sort of genetic tampering we are talking about, unless you want to use rabies as a carrier. IVF is widely practiced and has few barriers to entry, making me think it won’t get much cheaper. That is a lot of money for many parts of the world. To think this cost will come down in the next 10-20 years significantly requires believing that significant advances in automation of the process are possible: that might be true.
Financial incentives to have smarter children are likely to work better in those regions where $6,000 is a lot of money. It’s possible that combining both strategies works even better.
I don’t agree with this line of argument. Suppose there are five employes, and they all press the button. Each receives 100 utils, and loses 4, leading to a net gain of 96 each. Why is this not the ethically correct outcome, even for a deontologist?
Plus, it increases the price of food. The net effect is a transfer of wealth from poor people to agribusiness that grow and process raisins..
Ah, I missed that part of the OP. So then I think your argument is correct.
The few examples of UN lead responses to invasions that worked typically involved great powers backstopping the response. UN members are reluctant to expend blood and treasure without getting something in return. I think the only time it worked as intended was the Korean war, and that’s because Stalin was sitting out for a bit.
The Prime Number Theorem
A group of four people can stand two by two, but a group of five people can only stand five in a line. The number of numbers like five, and not like four, between two numbers, is the number of times you take two times what you had, starting at one, to get between the two numbers if the two numbers are close.
By “Wall Street” I’m including the Buy Side as well as the Sell Side. The big buyside firms like Fidelity and Charles Schwab sell products that most people shouldn’t buy. Insurance probably has a better case to buy some actively managed products, or some exotic derivatives, but I don’t know why it can’t do it itself.
To the extent that finance reallocates risk it can provide a positive utility benefit. However, the very productive businesses have questionable utility. Promoting active trading, picking hot funds etc, all eat into the returns clients can expect. Justify the existence of Charles Schwab’s S&P 500 index fund, with expense ratio twice that of Vanguards. The most profitable divisions of investment banks tend to be the ones with the least competition, and hence most questionable social benefit.
I’m aware Dodge and Cox is in SF, and Vanguard in Valley Forge, Blackrock in Princeton, etc. However, they are all on “the Street”.
The IRS doesn’t pay well: for government pay one might as well work for NASA and accomplish something fun.
I would like to declare the following: I have submitted a program that cooperates only if you would cooperate against CooperateBot. You can of course create a selective defector against it, but that would be a bit tricky, as I am not revealing the source code. Evaluate your submissions accordingly.