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The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

chris-martin.org

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Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#241

Post by fallingknife »

bsder wrote: post #216
mandevil wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest thing is about "Amazon was started in a garage" is that Jeff Bezos had worked at hedge fund D.E. Shaw (founded in 1989) from 1990-1994 (that's where he met MacKenzie, she was an admin staff, he was a finance guy). So he had hedge fund money already before he founded Amazon.

It also overlooks the fact that what Amazon was doing was outright illegal for years and they never got handed their ass on a platter. For years, Amazon enabled everybody to bypass sales tax which gave Amazon a 4-8% advantage on books over brick and mortar that had to pay both rent and sales tax. Quite a few of the "successful" tech companies followed this pattern: Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, etc. all engaged in blatantly il…

It was not illegal. Businesses are not required to charge sales tax in states where they have no operations.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#242

Post by acdha »

llm_nerd wrote: post #217
acdha wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> was a regular SWE who got cancelled. Granted I have not followed him closely but I haven't seen him claim to be a genius or special. He did more than that. It wasn’t that he had the opinion that women were innately less qualified but that he tried to repeatedly discuss that at work after being told not to. It wasn’t just that he was wrong about the biology (to be clear, he was[1]) but that he wanted to have a publi…

Man, I really don't want to be a Damore apologist, but- "that women were innately less qualified" He never said that, though. If you have to grossly misrepresent his argument like that, you've demonstrated that you have no good faith retort and have lost the argument at the outset. His paper was about on the average traits. That if you've split humans into various subsets -- for instance ethnicity, sex, age, etc -- e…

The problem with the averages argument is not that it’s wrong but that the established biological causes have been for basic low-level things like grip strength but not for higher level cognitive behaviour, especially at the level of software engineering at Google which combines a number of different advanced skills – and there’s a fair variation in the mix of skills equally successful people use, too. Running is a much simpler, highly physical skill which was highly relevant to our evolutionary history whereas being a senior engineer involves a mix of cognitive skills developed over a longer time in a highly social environment, and there just isn’t high-quality data linking those skills to innate biological traits at the level needed to explain the current outcomes.

Complex behavior is very hard to link to underlying biology because our brains are incredibly plastic and actual researchers spend a lot of time looking for ways to tease out the complex interplay between genes and training. I used to support some neuroscience labs which studied things like this but the researchers were careful to note the difference in confidence between the effects they measured and the attempts to identify the underlying biology (e.g. maybe undergrad men could track more moving objects than women, but if monkeys didn’t show an effect you might want to check things like how many hours they spent playing ball sports or video games). Everyone was generally of the opinion that there were innate differences, but that they couldn’t be anywhere near the magnitude we see with athletic performance because too many well-crafted studies have been done to miss something big.

When you’re looking at those bell curves, it’s important to remember that even if you ignore the questions about the methodology for things like personality traits the overlap is tighter than shown, and contrary to one of his foundational claims, there’s enough cultural variation to suggest that the effect is not biological in origin. The first piece I linked discusses at some length how he was thrown off by the Wikipedia summary of a meta-analysis paper on personality traits which found very limited effects, with one analysis within the margin of error. That pattern continues for the few claims he makes in enough detail to assess: inconclusive data, mistakes cribbed from intermediary sources, or failing to link a very low level behaviour to success at a company like Google.

That last part is really important to think about with all of the evo-psych stories which claim our social dynamics of today are based on our evolutionary history without considering just how different the skills we use to work in offices developing software are from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle – anyone at Google is working with more people than was common in most of our evolutionary history!

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#243

Post by wing-_-nuts »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #228
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it REALLY REALLY HELPS to also have a risk appetite, capital, and connections.. which are what coming from even moderate wealth provides. I graduated in 2008, and I watched classmates make the 'insane' decision to risk it all and go off and try to found startups. Inevitably, some failed, but to my shock it wasn't the end of the world for them? In one case the 'bank of mom and dad' paid rent until they got back on th…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076 "Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something. Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on. Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and ove…

Wow, this is a great analogy. I'm stealing it

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#244

Post by K0balt »

ryandrake wrote: post #184
K0balt wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a sort of perplexing subject for me. I grew up pretty poor. We had a well, but not running water. We flushed with a bucket, bathed out of a trash can-cum-water barrel. We subsistence hunted. We had vehicles that mostly ran, most of the time. Yet I can see that I was , in fact, born into privilege. Not a privilege of money, but a privilege of priority, skills, and acceptance of risk. My parents prioritized one…

How does this land help you? What do you do with it? I'm totally lost on how a half acre in the middle of Montana does anything for you, if you already have somewhere to live. Do you just enjoy camping or something?

Well, I did mention that I’m drunk at 3 am, buying land on eBay, right?

A few places I really like and have given to my kids or other family members for a second home spot or recreational getaway.

Two are located in places that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to live in full time, I let the neighbors “rent” them (for a a few pesos a year) to use for farming or whatever. One never knows how the world will shape up, maybe they come in handy. If not, maybe a grandkid can use it.

Others I have undoubtedly forgotten about and have been confiscated for taxes, I suppose.

The value I have seen generated for others by my reckless dalliances are more than worth the cost. I mean, one of the best ones only cost $300.

I could easily spend that on a night out, and no way that is going to fundamentally improve anyone’s life. It’s like gambling for the chance to make someone’s life better.

I have also been known to midnight purchase sailboats in places I want to visit. Sometimes you can get great deals on boats that the owners have left behind. Usually I’ll go there and tinker for a few weeks, enjoying myself and sailor culture, take it out sailing until I want to go home, then sell it for (usually) much more than I paid and I get a free vacation.

A few years ago I bought a 32’ roberts (comfortable, but a bit of a pig in chop) near San Fransisco. She was $900 with a great slip and a flaky outboard. I spent a week getting her in shape, 500 dollars on a one-season racing sail and another 300 getting it recut, bought a few sandbags because she seemed a bit tender with the heavy pilot house, and sailed around the canals for a few days, then spent a week cruising the bay. After that, I spent a few days at the municipal dock, 100 feet from million dollar condos in a fantastic part of town.

Great times and great street culture back then. I hear it has kinda gone downhill?

Anyway, I used it for a “vacation home” for a few years and sold her at a fair but beneficial price.

I’m a little more settled down now, raising a new batch of kids…but if there’s a secret to life, it’s to own land outright, and avoid debt at all cost. Buy it when you’ve earned it. Until then, buy what you can afford to own, where you can afford to live. The compromises you have to make will pay excellent dividends. /grandpa rant

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#245

Post by systemstops »

munificent wrote: post #199
systemstops wrote: post #186

"If these are the conditions under which passionate creative problem solving thrives, then of course we must recover them to make software great again. But they are not." This doesn't make any sense. Obviously those conditions lead to incredible thriving in the past. This guy is basically arguing that because it doesn't work now (in a super diverse globalized world) that it never actually worked. These are the same k…

There is an infinitely long list of things that were part of the environment when that kind of passionate creative problem solving in software was thriving. What the author is saying is that not all of those properties were causative to make software great again. Do we need people to have enough of a safety net to take risks with entrepreneurship? Yes. Do we need enough regulation to prevent entrenched companies from…

People still argue what things made a small city state (Athens) suddenly become the cornerstone of western civilization. That fact is that we have these explosions of human potential where certain groups of people in certain environments make massive leaps, and we don't what the magic sauce is. It's great when it happens, but It's foolish to think that we can somehow socially engineer the same results through brute force, which is the problem with DEI thinking. That is also why so many companies are silently ditching those policies.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#246

Post by K0balt »

bhaney wrote: post #180
K0balt wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just check eBay. If you want it to turn out good, it’s best to go and see. If we’re talking about $1200 parcels, it costs more to vet than to buy. Just look it over and judge the best you can on the information you can gather, and accept the 30 percent risk that it won’t be what you expected in some way or another. Or, go there. Not worth paying a title agency or any of that crap. Be sure of any tax burden (easily re…

Do you have more advice for finding land to buy other than using ebay? I've been looking for a while for a few acres of unimproved/secluded/wooded land within an hour or two drive away from me here in Kansas, mostly just for bushcrafting or tooling around. The only place I really know to check is Zillow, and while there are a few listings in my distance range, they're typically upwards of $10k/acre. I just checked eb…

Well, the trick to finding it cheap is to not look for anything/anywhere specific, so I doubt I can help with that. It’s not that I am good at it, it’s that when I’m momentarily bored, I’m not in a picky mood. If it’s cheap and I can imagine a life there, no matter how humble, and it makes me smile, then my wife is probably going to be asking me questions I don’t have good answers for and I’m going to have to work on a reasonable explanation that doesn’t sound like I’ve finally gone off the deep end.

It’s pretty much all eBay for me or local equivalents in other countries. So many rabbit holes.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#247

Post by munificent »

systemstops wrote: post #245
munificent wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an infinitely long list of things that were part of the environment when that kind of passionate creative problem solving in software was thriving. What the author is saying is that not all of those properties were causative to make software great again. Do we need people to have enough of a safety net to take risks with entrepreneurship? Yes. Do we need enough regulation to prevent entrenched companies from…

People still argue what things made a small city state (Athens) suddenly become the cornerstone of western civilization. That fact is that we have these explosions of human potential where certain groups of people in certain environments make massive leaps, and we don't what the magic sauce is. It's great when it happens, but It's foolish to think that we can somehow socially engineer the same results through brute f…

DEI is not about brute forcing an environment for success, at all. That's not the goal even a little bit.

DEI is about recognizing that our culture has placed some people at a disadvantage by virtue of properties they have no control over and attempting to remedy that imbalance.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#248

Post by BergAndCo »

jglamine wrote: post #52

This essay is weird. The author lumps James Damore, rank-and-file software engineer, in with Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg. Damore hasn't updated his LinedIn since 2018 - he might not even work in tech anymore? It closes saying they need to stop reliving their glory days and be good fathers and not the town drunk. Those are serious accusations - being a bad father and a drunk. The author doesn't give any eviden…

[dead]

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#249

Post by mandevil »

fallingknife wrote: post #241
bsder wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also overlooks the fact that what Amazon was doing was outright illegal for years and they never got handed their ass on a platter. For years, Amazon enabled everybody to bypass sales tax which gave Amazon a 4-8% advantage on books over brick and mortar that had to pay both rent and sales tax. Quite a few of the "successful" tech companies followed this pattern: Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, etc. all engaged in blatantly il…

It was not illegal. Businesses are not required to charge sales tax in states where they have no operations.

If you had said "were" instead of "are" this would be a true statement. Since South Dakota v. Wayfair in 2018, states have been allowed to charge sales taxes on businesses that have no operations in their state. That decision overturned 1992's Quill v. North Dakota, which held as you say. But that is no longer the law of the land.

The 5-4 majority in 2018 included two justices who were part of the unanimous holding in 1992 (Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas), voting to overturn their own decision from a quarter century before.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#250

Post by hattmall »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #243
toomuchtodo wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076 "Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something. Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on. Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and ove…

Wow, this is a great analogy. I'm stealing it

Except most entrepreneurs are from poor backgrounds. Maybe not in software but everything from lawn care to selling cocaine is entrepreneurship.
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